January 12, 1998
Walter E. Diemer, 93, Bubble Gum Inventor
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
alter E. Diemer, who invented bubble gum and taught salesmen
how to market it by blowing gooey pink bubbles, died on Thursday at
a hospital near his home in Lancaster, Pa. He was 93.
Diemer was a fledgling accountant for Fleer Chewing Gum Co. in
Philadelphia when he began testing recipes for a gum base -- the
part that makes gum chewy -- in his spare time in 1928, when he was
23. He unwittingly created the first batch of bubble gum, making it
pink because that was the only shade of food coloring on hand.
"It was an accident," Diemer said in an interview with the
Lancaster Intelligencer Journal in 1996. "I was doing something
else and ended up with something with bubbles."
Americans had been chewing gum since 1870, when a New Yorker
named Charles Adams began manufacturing "Adams New York Gum No.1"
in a Manhattan warehouse. By the 1920s, a handful of companies
around the nation were making gum from chicle, a form of sapodilla
tree sap that had been chewed in Belize, Guatemala and Mexico for
centuries.
But Diemer's pink concoction was stretchier and less sticky than
earlier gum formulas. Its promise became evident when he took a
5-pound batch to a Philadelphia grocery and it sold out in one
afternoon. Fleer Co. took over the recipe and called it Dubble
Bubble, selling the gum in yellow wrappers for a penny apiece.
Diemer helped market Dubble Bubble by teaching salesmen to blow
bubbles so they could demonstrate the product.
Dubble Bubble had no competition until after World War II, when
Topps Co. of Brooklyn, N.Y., began wrapping bubble gum in comics
and calling it Bazooka. Both brands became known internationally,
and other companies later made bubble gum in sticks, flakes,
nuggets, powders and even pastes.
Diemer, who went to work for the Fleer Co. after high school,
never received royalties for his invention, said his wife, Florence
Freeman Kohler Diemer. But he received hundreds of letters from
children thanking him for bubble gum, she said. Although he rarely
chewed gum, he would invite groups of children to his home and tell
them about his invention, then preside over bubble-blowing
contests, his wife said.
"He was terrifically proud of it," Mrs. Diemer said. "He
would say to me: 'I've done something with my life. I've made kids
happy around the world.' "
Diemer eventually became senior vice president of Fleer,
retiring in 1970, his wife said. He oversaw construction of bubble
gum plants in Philadelphia and Barcelona and traveled around the
world marketing the gum, she said. He moved to Ocean City, N.J.,
after retiring, but served on Fleer's Board of Directors until
1980.
After Fleer's first wife died in 1991, he moved to Lancaster,
Pa., where he was known as a free spirit who rode around town on a
big tricycle. He remarried in 1996. His two children from his first
marriage died in 1986.
Diemer is survived by his wife, five grandchildren, and nine
great-grandchildren.