William Wrigley Jr. - The Sultan of Spearmint

In this episode of Dirt Nap City, we take a deep dive into the life and legacy of a man whose name is synonymous with Chicago, baseball, and the literal stickiness of American pop culture: William Wrigley Jr. Before he was the king of the north side, Wrigley was a traveling salesman with a simple philosophy: give people something they didn’t know they wanted. Most people know the name from Wrigley Field, the iconic home of the Chicago Cubs, but the journey from selling scouring soap to building a global confectionery empire is a masterclass in marketing, persistence, and the power of a "free gift."

The Accidental Empire

We explore how Wrigley didn’t actually set out to invent chewing gum. He started by selling soap, then baking powder—using gum as a mere incentive to get shopkeepers to stock his shelves. When he realized the "bonus" gum was more popular than the product he was actually selling, he pivoted. It was this adaptability that defined his career and eventually gave birth to legendary brands like Juicy Fruit and Wrigley’s Spearmint.

Inside the Episode:

• The Marketing Genius: How Wrigley spent millions on advertising during economic downturns when everyone else was pulling back.
• The Chicago Connection: The history behind the purchase of the Cubs and the transformation of Weeghman Park into the ivy-covered cathedral of baseball we know today.
• The Legacy of the "Doublemint" King: Why his impact on American business is still felt every time you walk down a candy aisle.

About Dirt Nap City

Dirt Nap City is your weekly guide to the most interesting dead people in history. We exhume the stories of the icons, the eccentrics, and the visionaries who shaped our world from six feet under. Whether you’re a history buff, a baseball fan, or just someone who loves a good "rags-to-riches" story, this episode on William Wrigley Jr. is one you won’t want to spit out.

Listen now to hear how one man turned a five-cent pack of gum into a multi-generational dynasty.

William Wrigley Jr, Chicago Cubs History, Wrigley Field, History of Chewing Gum, Chicago Business Icons, Dirt Nap City Podcast.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hey Alex, it's Thursday morning. How you doing, man? Always Thursday morning in Dirtnap City, dude. It's weird. Yeah. It's it's like a combination of uh Dirt Nap City and Groundhog's Day, I guess. The two together. Yeah. Um, I'm doing great. I'm feeling like we're starting to get into springtime. We've had uh, you know, I've always got to talk about the weather to start off, but we've had a really nice little cold snap, and now it's getting hot and muggy again. But what are you gonna do?

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Sometimes these go out though like two, three months after we record them. So it could be dead of summer right now, and you're not gonna be feeling like it's good weather. It's gonna be hot, you're gonna have sticky shorts.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Of course, that depends on where you are. You know that our our podcast is listened to and downloaded in over a hundred countries. That's true. That's true, like thousands of cities in a hundred countries.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Um, so you know, it could be could be dead of winter there. You never know.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

If you're in Chile, it could be the wintertime.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Yeah, Antarctica, it's always cold. Australia. Yep, yep. New Zealand, the Kiwis. Hey Kiwis, shout out to our Kiwi friends. If you're a Kiwi friend, hit us up at not at dirtnapcity.com and uh I'll I'll ship a sticker to to um New Zealand if someone lives there.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Have you ever been there? No, never been to Australia or New Zealand. How about you? No, let's do a road trip. I think I think that's part of our world tour. It really should be. Uh, I am going to Ireland in a couple of weeks. You knew that, right? I love Ireland.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

No, I didn't know that, but I love Ireland.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Yeah, you told me you had a good time there. And you told me not to uh mess with the soccer hooligans, the football hooligans.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

It's hard, man. It's hard to know when you're in a bad area. People will try to tell you to get out, though. I didn't listen to them, but they would always say, you know, you shouldn't be here. Get out. You shouldn't be here, mate. You're wearing the wrong colors. When I was there, the big thing everyone was saying was, What's the story? What's the story? And I thought that was a cute little thing, but that was like I think it was an aggressive thing. Kind of a threat, like like WTF is wrong with you or something. What's the story? Uh be like, yeah, what's the story, man? Yeah, I was in a I was a mess the whole time I was there. I just was not picking up on all the any of the right cues.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

You're trying to high-five these guys and they're trying to punch you in the in the nose.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

In a way, ignorance was bliss because I never picked up on when people were like being aggressive to me. Um, but yeah, that was the big thing, is everybody would they'd like bow up on you and go, what's the story?

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Okay, I'll watch out for that. Um yeah, but but you know, I'm gonna have my wife and kids with me, so hopefully they're a little less uh, you know, I'm not a I'm not a threat to them. I've got I've got a family in tow. Yeah, yeah, that's probably is probably particularly.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

But it's a rough place if you're not if you're not careful, it's a rough place. I mean, there's you know the um but everything seems funny there. Like, yeah, I mean, even like um, you know, they have legit family feuds, you know, not just the game show, but it's like the McGillicutties and the McIntyre's are are feuding, and they put you know, there's they're you know, messing with like car bombs and things like that. I mean, it's a very serious thing, but um it's also very um you can't help but hear the Lucky Charms um you know vibe going.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

I'm sure they love it when you say that too. Oh, I'm sure that's it. See, that's the thing. That's why they said what's the story? You were laughing at them, and they're like, What's the story? Why are you laughing?

SPEAKER_01 3:40

And Ireland, if you're if you're Ireland, if you listen to me, I love you. I love you. Um I think you're charming and lucky charming. And I don't think you I don't think you always want to be charming, though. I think you want to have some street cred, and I just thought you were adorable. Yeah, cute little oh look at that.

SPEAKER_03 4:02

That's a that's a cute little that's a cool not being offensive.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

I hope Bono, if you're listening, it's all love, man. Well, he's Northern Island, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:10

This is Edge, if you're listening, uh it's all love, man. Well, I wanted to talk to you today about an American. Let's get back to let's get back to American white guys from uh the from the late 1800s to early 1900s. As a matter of fact, this guy was born in 1861 in Philadelphia, and he died in Phoenix, Arizona in 1932 at the age of 70 years old in January. His father sold soap and he got into the soap business at a very early age, and he actually kind of created an empire, but he did it accidentally. An accidental empire. Yeah, yeah. And by that I mean he set out to do one thing, and then he smartly pivoted when he saw some signs, and when he pivoted, that was what made him successful was the pivot. And it has nothing to do with soap. No, not really, not really. No, and it has nothing to do with Arizona either. No, actually, he's most known. Um, even though he was born in Philadelphia, he moved to Chicago, and he's most known in Chicago. As a matter of fact, his name is pretty synonymous with Chicago.

SPEAKER_02 5:21

Mmm.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Hmm, hmm. Chicago sports, even Chicago sports in the early 1900s? Chicago sports today and the early 1900s. Like, like what Chicago sport um icon has been there this whole time? Wrigley Field. Ooh, yes. Talking about Wrigley Wrigley gum? I'm talking about William Mills Wrigley Jr. William Mills Wrigley Jr., a uh a man who is dead and interesting because of the legacy he left. And he wasn't exactly looking to sell gum. Nobody back then said, you know what this country needs? We need more gum. We need more flavors. Nobody said that. Nobody said that back in the day. They they they were more soap people. Um he uh William Wrigley Jr. grew up uh basically his father, even though he was fairly successful, he grew up working. He didn't he didn't have um uh a self-discovery of journaling, he didn't have an iPad, he didn't have a YouTube channel or a podcast. He had a job, and his job was selling soap as a traveling salesman at the age of 13, he started. He's going around selling soap, and I think that really gave him a lot of uh tenacity. It helped him to understand people say no, people don't care, people always uh you know, kind of are suspicious of somebody who's selling to them. But he he persevered and he was like, you know what though?

SPEAKER_01 6:55

I would think that if you had a a route, like a paper route, and you hit people like I don't know how long soap lasts, but maybe a week or two.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Depending on how big the family is, I suppose. Um you know, why not? Just have like a basically a subscription where a guy comes and he just gives you your soap and you don't have to worry about that. I mean, it seems like once you get returning client, why would somebody say no once you once they've tried your soap, they like it? Because maybe they like being stinky.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Oh, well, that's that's a good reason. Yeah. Maybe they don't like to bathe. Um, no, it it came down to, I think, you know, at a young age, he wasn't getting the best route, right? He was he was kind of like, all right, you go, you go see if you can sell these people. Kind of like Johnny Cash was when he was doing door-to-door sales. You know, he was getting the the lowest of the low. But Wrigley wasn't like cash. Cash, cash, you know, he didn't want to sell the people that didn't need it. Wrigley was a natural salesman. He could take no, but he also tried to take yes. And he did well enough that his father allowed him in uh 19 or 1891. So remember he was born in 1861. So at the age of 30, uh, his father gave him 32 bucks and said, go set up um, set up a business in Chicago. He moved from Philadelphia at the age of 30 with 32 bucks. Now, 32 bucks at that time was worth about $1,100, $1,200. So was it wasn't chump change, but it wasn't, you know, wasn't enough to really live on for very long. So he formed the Wrigley's Scouring Soap Company in 1891 in Chicago. Now, why do you think he went to Chicago? I was just gonna ask you.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

I mean, probably because it was a big city. It was growing fast. It was a good like um intersection of different train lines, right? Yeah, yeah. Like the east basically where the east met the west, right? Yep, yep. Um, it was a place where livestock, uh it was a lot of uh exchange of livestock, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:05

That'll create some stink that needs washing, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:08

No, but isn't soap made out of like uh oh, out of lye and lard and stuff like that? Yeah, don't you need the animal products to do that?

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The tallow and well the other big thing was Chicago had had the great fire um in the late 1800s, and it was rebuilding from that. And it really was kind of it was modernizing everything, it was becoming a major intersection of train lines and and uh trade and all that in the U.S. It was growing like crazy. That's where the action was. Yeah, yeah. Philadelphia was on its way down, Chicago was on its way up. So he moved there with this tenacity he had learned from selling soap from the age of 13. He started, he had this little um gimmick that he that he came up with. And this is what he really was. He was an innovative salesman, he was an innovative marketer. He came up with this idea to give away baking powder, which I think was something he could get really cheaply, and he gave it away with the soap. Now, do you know what baking powder is is good for? What it's used for? I mean baking, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Yeah, like rising, like it doesn't make the yeast rise or something.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

Yeah, it has carbon dioxide, and it is an acid-based reaction, causes bubbles to expand, and it it leavens the mixture and it makes things a little bit lighter and fluffier, you know. And so he was giving away the baking powder free with the soap. Well, guess what? The people that he was uh giving the baking powder to and selling the soap to wanted the baking powder more than they wanted the soap. So you know what you know what Wrigley did? He switched to selling baking powder. Okay. And then he came up with another gimmick. He's like, oh, that worked pretty well. Let's try this. He started giving away a package or two packages of chewing gum with each can of baking powder that was purchased. Now, at that time, chewing gum was a little bit more medicinal. It was made so that people could um uh use it for cleaning their teeth, for uh kind of keeping germs out. You know, it there wasn't a lot of oral hygiene back then, and so chewing gum was seen as more of something that would help people keep cleaner teeth. Well, people went crazy for the chewing gum. As a matter of fact, they were like, Yeah, we don't need baking powder, we want more of the gum. So he pivoted again, and he decided that um now he was gonna sell chewing gum, and so he uh he founded the Wrigley's Chewing Gum Company, and that is what built the empire. So gum was crazy back then.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

I was actually no kidding, just thinking about this a couple days ago, about how gum was always just these hard sticks, even when we were kids, it was just these hard sticks. Well, I mean you could probably fit a lot of chewing gum like in a palette because I mean it's so flat. Like gum isn't like that anymore.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

They all come in, like you know, like yeah, it's a cube or or a round thing, you know, the mentos or the man, those flat sticks. They seem so arcane.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Yeah, and I was a baseball card guy, you know, and the it was nothing drier than the gum that came in a baseball card.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

So that was another thing. Like that was another thing where people you didn't buy it for the gum, you probably threw the gum away, you know, or chewed it for two minutes and spit it out. But but um no, you you talked about it being hard and flat. It started uh do you want to guess when gum started? Like when the first uh things we found, and this is just based on um archaeology and finding these um imprints, tooth imprints from guess guess how long ago? Oh, it's like BC, probably, right? Five thousand years ago. Wow they they found um tooth imprints on Burke Barch Tar, and that was in Finland. The Finnish was the first place we found evidence of people chewing gum. And then the Mayans, the Aztecs, they used chikle. You've heard of chickle, which is a natural tree gum. Um, and they would use that. They actually used it not only to chew, but they would chew it and then they would use it as like a glue to stick things together. What is xanthom gum? Do you know what that is? Xanthem. Um I don't have that in my history of gum.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

I mean, I I know it's a thing that's used like in food. Oh, oh, it's a modern gum. It's not chewing gum.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

It's with an X?

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not chewing gum, but it's just gum. But gum that, yeah, that like sap, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:46

So, so well, Chick-lay was was um was from a specific tree, um, but then the Native Americans in the U.S. would chew resin made from spruce trees and from sap. So, yes, there was sap involved. And then in New England, a guy named John B. Curtis actually developed and sold the first commercial gum in the state of Maine, and it was called pure spruce gum in 1848. So this wasn't that long before Wrigley. Are you a gum guy? I do like the mentos gum. I do like the mentos gum. I keep those uh, you know, they're like uh round um packages with a little pop top on them. Fresh breath, you know, they they kind of take stuff out of your teeth. I do feel like your teeth get a little cleaner. I don't like sugar-free gum that much. I like orbit, like an orbit. Orbit's good, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Um when I was uh a kid, remember freshen up?

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Oh yeah, yeah. Was that the one? No, what was what was the one that had this the burst of yeah? That was freshen up.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

It had the little yeah, you'd just it was like toothpaste, basically. You'd chew it and then this burst of jelly would come out. And the big one though, when I was when I played uh Little League was Big League 2. Gator Gum. Do you remember Gator Gum? Yes, yes, actually Gator Gum had the best flavor, but for like 30 seconds. Yeah, it didn't last very long. But I agree. It was so good though.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

It it was it was and it was different.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

It was made by for for those younger people, it was a Gatorade gum.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

They need to come back with that. I bet you their technology now could make it where it lasts the taste would last a lot longer than 30 seconds. It didn't, it didn't taste like alligator, it tasted like Gatorade. Right. It tasted like well, not to be confused with gator. I don't know if it tasted like gator beat. It was a great taste that people our age probably all can re I can picture that taste right now. That'd be a great dead end.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Gator gum was awesome. Uh wow. I I do remember liking it. I do remember it was a little harder to find than the other gum. Like every the other gum, you know, Wrigley's is everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

And there was a purple one that we all loved, some kind of grape-flavored gum that was big when we were kids. I can't I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

I've never been a big fan of the purple, um, the grape flavor.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

That's anything that like immediately would be like quenching.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

Right, right. That was the ghetto gum, was very quenching. That was what it was designed for. Yeah. Well, so so you know, we I just mentioned that John B. Curtis um kind of made the first commercial gum called the the state of Maine pure spruce gum uh in 1848. And then around 1850, they started adding paraffin wax to it. Now, paraffin wax is a petroleum product that is used to um kind of make it last a little bit longer, but they still weren't sweet. As a matter of fact, people would take their sticks of gum and they would chew them, and then and then after they've been chewing it for a while, they would take it out, dip it into a plate of powdered sugar, and kind of you know, spin it around, and the powdered sugar would stick to it, and then they would chew that for a while. So it was almost like they would refresh the flavor with powdered sugar over and over again.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Now, ironically, you know, they say whether it's debatable whether gum's good for your teeth or not. I ironically, um, a guy named William Semple, and he was a dentist from Mount Vernon, Ohio, in 1869, a gum that was supposed to make the teeth clean and the chewer's jaw strong. It was actually advertised to increase the strength and your jawline. Like a jawbreaker? No, it didn't break your jaw. It it made your jaw strong. So that way you could eat jawbreakers. If you if you chew this gum, your jaw would be strong enough to not break when you ate a jawbreaker. Um, but you know what he used in his? He uses paraffin wax and he also used chalk. He used licorice root, and I'm not a big fan of licorice, by the way. No, me neither. Remember blackjack gum? That was uh and also charcoal. There was charcoal in this gum. So it was pretty hardcore. I think there still is charcoal gum out there. Really?

SPEAKER_01 18:02

I think in terms of the whether or not it's good for your teeth, I think obviously any gum with sugar in it is bad for your teeth. But I think the reason that sugar-free gum, they say, is good for your teeth, is that saliva is good for your teeth. That that production of saliva, which gum will do, and it's always good to not have a dry mouth and to keep keep that saliva going.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

If you're a dentist out there, um, three out of five dentists will probably agree with me. Right. For for patients who do chew gum.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

The other the other two, I don't want to hear from you. Yeah, just leave us alone. Go listen, go listen to another podcast. Well, okay, so we're getting all we're getting towards the end of this little history of gum. So we got Mount Vernon, where William Sheppel came up with this really bad charcoal, licorice root gum. And then in eight in the 1860s, a Louisville, Kentucky pharmacist named John Colgan came up with a gum that was flavored by Tolu. Now, tolu is a powder obtained from balsam tree, and he was the first one to put it into sticks. So you you act talked about sticks and pallets of this. He actually patented this idea of putting it into sticks, and he called it Taffy Tolu. And he would make this stuff, and then later on, he also patented the idea of these little bits of foil that would go around it. So he had those two patents that was called the web cutting attachment for wrapping machines, and it was patented in 1909. So this guy, you know, he was kind of the one that made the modern stick of gum what it is today. This guy, John Colgan. And it literally, you can still buy those today. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it hasn't I'm I bet his family gets a little residual every time you open a pack of flat chewing gum. Yeah. And maybe that's why so many other um companies now are making them a different shape, so they don't have to pay that, they don't have to pay that royalty. And I bet you back in the day you could buy just a stick of gum.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

I don't think you can I don't think you can do that. No, no, you didn't buy a pack.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

And it was probably a penny. Oh, like a half penny. Remember they had the half pennies back then. By the way, if you want to learn about pennies and half pennies, especially for you younger ones that have never seen a penny since they're gone now, uh, check out our our episode called Stop Making Sense, C-E-N-T-S. Most clever, most clever title I've ever come up with. Um, so in 1893, Wrigley launched his first chew gums. Do you want to guess what his first two flavors were?

SPEAKER_01 20:42

I hope you're not going to say spearmint. Yes. We've already established on this show that spearmint is not a real flavor.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

Spearmint was the OG.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Nobody wants, nobody asked for spearmint. Spearmint is a poor man's peppermint. The other one might surprise you. Um is it still around? Is it banana?

SPEAKER_00 21:01

No, no, that would be great if it was. No, it was juicy fruit. That's a flavor? Juicy fruit, God. I thought that was a brand. No, no, no, no. It's a flavor of uh it's a flavor of Wrigley. They still call it that. Yeah, yeah, and they call it still call spearmint spearmint.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Well, is spearmint not a mint? Is not a real thing? Um, no, it is a type of mint. Yeah, spearmint is a type of mint. Why wouldn't they?

SPEAKER_00 21:29

You can grow spearmint in your in your garden.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Juicy fruit's not a real fruit, then.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

What spearmint?

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Juicy fruit is not real.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Juicy fruit was made up, but I mean there is juicy fruit, right? Um I mean, I know some juicy fruits.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

So oranges are juicy. Yeah, yeah. Um, plums are juicy.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Uh debatable.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

I mean you know you know you gotta get a good one. Any peaches are peaches are juicy. Juicy.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

They're sloppy juicy.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Grapefruits are juicy.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Yeah, yeah. Although we've already established that grapefruit doesn't isn't a great flavor for it's more of a health thing, right? Tomatoes are juicy. Technically a fruit. Not a great, not a great flavor for gum. Never heard of tomato flavored gum. You know, that wouldn't be terrible. Yes, it would. It'd be right up there with licorice. It sounds okay. I like a good tomato, but I want to know it's actually a tomato. I don't want tomato getting into other stuff. It's like cranberries, you know, cran apple, cran grape. What why is cranberry getting into all this stuff? I think that I think that I think I'd be into tomato gum. Okay. Okay. Well, maybe we should try it. Maybe we should uh we should we should you know that you can use AI now to tell you how to make things like that. Like, how would I make a tomato flavored gum? And AI can come up with all the stuff, you can order it online, and you can make it. We could uh brand it with the Dirt Knap City brand.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

It'll put you there quickly if you chew too much of it. All the arsenic we use. I don't think that would be terrible. It might be pretty concentrated. You'd have to make it in order to make it taste very tomato-y. Yeah. I bet you V8 tried it at one point.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

VK came and stole their stole their audience. Well, let's get back to Wrigley. Um, I want to talk about building the gum empire. So he he founded the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company in 1893. He came up with Juicy Fruit, Spearmint, and this is all in Chicago. But here's the thing he was it wasn't really that everybody thought he he was solving a problem that didn't exist. People didn't really chew gum back then. They didn't they didn't really think about it. But what he did was genius. He started to do something that was reliable and consistent. He came up with things that people could trust. They knew if they bought this, they were gonna be able to uh it's gonna be the same flavor. That tomato flavored gum is gonna taste the same no matter where they buy it. Um and he focused on distribution. He wanted this in stores, he wanted it in counters, he wanted it um, you know, he actually distributed it overseas, and he tried to make it a uh daily habit, something that was small. And you know, a lot of people back then were trying to make things luxury items, like kind of price them high. He wanted this to be a daily habit, like coffee, um, so that basically people who started chewing gum would chew it every day and spend a few cents every day. And that is how he built his empire.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Probably introduced the idea of like um what do they call it, impulse buying too, where you just put it right at the check at the cash register. Yes, and you go, Oh yeah, since it's a penny or a half penny, you go, I'll take one of these too, right? And still that's where you find the gum.

SPEAKER_00 24:47

That's right. To this day, it's right right there at the end of the day. That's usually where that's usually where I buy it. I wasn't planning to buy gum, but oh, there's my there's my mentos gum, and I like that stuff. And oh, look, they have a coupon. Thanks, H E B. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

If they move gum to the back of the store, you wouldn't purposely go and find gum. Never buy it.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Yeah. Well, so he really was one of the first people to really market things by blanketing the city of Chicago with signs and slogans. And you know, he had a sign actually that's pretty cool. It says, Sealed tight, kept right. The largest chewing gum factory in the world sells Wrigley's the flavor that lasts. And these are like little pictures of you know that little gum guy. Have you ever seen him? He's like a smiley face in a gum packet. Can you imagine this? No. Um, it was it was it was the ads he would use, and this little they had a little mascot back then, but he blanketed the entire city of Chicago. He uh sent these things overseas to other countries, and guess what he did during World War I and World War II? He gave away free gum to the soldiers. These were in their rations packs, and guess what that did? These soldiers would share them with people overseas, and so all of a sudden the liberators are chewing this cool stuff from America. We need it. Well, we we need this delicious stuff that has liberated us. We need it. It wasn't German, that was supposed to be French. So this became what he really was good at was this psychological imprinting that people trusted what what the gum was, they were familiar with it. And you know, it's funny, people don't always buy the best thing, they buy the thing they're most familiar with. Familiar familiarity and trust go hand in hand, and then he became ubiquitous, it was everywhere, and so he dominated the gum field because everybody knew the name Wrigley.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

Boy, that's a volume business, though, isn't it? Like you can't just you can't you have to sell, you have to move so many units of that stuff to make any money, I'll bet. That's true. That's true.

SPEAKER_00 27:02

You do have to do that.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

But it's probably pretty cheap to produce, too.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Very, very cheap to produce and and pretty actually pretty cheap to distribute a lot of it. You you mentioned earlier how much would fit on a pallet. You know, a lot of sticks of gum will fit on a pallet. And so But that's all fine and good.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

But if if you're also like it'd be good to be the second player in the market, right? Yeah once people already like gum and you realize that it's cheap to produce, and you but he was having to do all that and convince people that this is something that they needed that they didn't already like. Well that's that's to sell something that low cost that isn't part of their you have to like you say, you have to make it a daily habit to make any money. Like that's amazing to actually change the habits of people.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

Well, introducing it. You're not really changing an old habit, you're introducing a new one. Right. So, you know, some other ways that he he did this was um by naming landmarks in Chicago. You mentioned Wrigley Field when we first started. Um, you know, the fact that it's called Wrigley Field, that immediately for anybody who's a fan of the Chicago Cubs, and by the way, he was an owner of the Cubs for a while. Um there's the Wrigley building. You know, we know the Sears Tower, we know some of these. Have you ever seen the Wrigley building? It's a beautiful building. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's really a it's really a uh statement, right? It's not tall, but it's just it's big. Well, it's it's wide and it has kind of a tall center section, not super tall. You're right, it's not like trying to be the Sears Tower, but um, you know, he was a brand first thinker, is what he decided. He wanted Wrigley to be. When you think of gum, you think of Wrigley.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

But I think Wrigley Field is named after him, not the gum. It's not Wrigley Gum Stadium or the company is named after him, right? So ultimately it's weird though, you never think of that as being like a like so many stadiums are corporate names. You don't really think of that as being a corporate name. No, because it's been around so long. I guess yeah, it's just iconic now, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

Yeah, yeah. Um it it was um and and he was an owner of the Chicago or a majority owner of the Chicago Cubs for a little while. Yeah, it's just kind of branding at a and but you do associate you do associate gum with summer, you associate baseball with summer. There's some parallels there, and I'll bet they sold the heck out of gum at those games. Oh, you think? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're they're they're gonna push it hard and they're probably gonna have all their players chewing it, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:45

The problem with that though, I'm sure the maintenance people in the stadium didn't love that. Because you got gum on seats.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

So so you're right. Actually, funny story, I was filming yesterday at a hospital for work. Um, we were filming some some uh uh interviews, and I went to the restroom, and it it's a very clean hospital. They had it's a nice hospital up in Round Rock, and they had um uh these little you know, co-ed bathrooms or or male-female bathrooms, one one stall, one sink kind of thing. And I went in and there was a piece of gum stuck to the wall where someone had obviously tried to spit it into the trash can, but it had hit the wall. And and uh I I thought for a moment, I grabbed, I washed my hands, I grabbed the paper towel, and I pulled it off the wall and put it in the trash. Oh, good for you. Yeah, yeah. I thought I'd leave that bathroom cleaner than I found it. But you're right, gum. And you know, I went to summer camp in Missouri for years and years, and that was one of the big rules there. No chewing gum allowed. Absolutely. Oh, yeah. School. And you know, you know, it was just a mess. Yeah. Uh um, Mr. Mr. Mylam, are you chewing gum? Are you wearing socks?

SPEAKER_01 31:00

Yeah, and and not only that, but it got the reputation that if you talked while you're chewing gum, you're just kind of like a a bad kid, you know. A yokel, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:10

No, um, it it it was something that again, nobody knew that it had to um nobody knew they needed it until they became it became a habit. It's kind of like coffee, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

But you know what a genius idea was, and I don't know if you're getting about to get into this, but is uh nicotine gum is a really good idea.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

Yeah, yeah. Um there that is definitely one use case for gum that that people kind of came up with later.

SPEAKER_01 31:41

Um I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most popular kind of gum sold right now is nicer. Really? I wouldn't be surprised.

SPEAKER_00 31:51

Well, there's also gum. So so in addition to um nicotine gum to help people quit smoking, um, there's sugar-free gum, which is, as you said, more for dental health.

SPEAKER_01 32:01

Well, if I see an adult chewing gum these days, I assume it's it's nicer. Do you not chew any gum? I don't I'm not a big gum chewer, no.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

If I if if I found you uh uh like a 20-year-old packet of gator gum on eBay, I might try it. Yeah, I might try this. Or or should we just go get some knickeret and see what that's all about? No, I don't think you should get hooked on that. Um, well, there's also gum with caffeine. Have you ever seen that? Nope. So it's kind of a pick-me-up gum. Um, I've I've chewed it a few times when I was driving a long distance and just needed I didn't want to drink any more coffee, I didn't want to drink any more soda or have to go to the bathroom. How's that? Uh it wasn't very tasty. It doesn't have a very good flavor to it. It it kind of um it kind of but it keeps you awake. It definitely works. I don't I don't think I would like that. Well, so the key takeaway here, William Wrigley Jr., he didn't invent gum. He didn't discover a new ingredient, he didn't really make it any better. You know, he he did he did get some flavors, and and I will say one other thing is the Wrigley's um portfolio is a pretty deep portfolio. There are a lot of different gums that you might have thought before. Um I I think Orbit might be actually owned by Wrigley's actually, you know, and you said you liked Orbit Gum. Um but he just really figured out that if you could get people to form a new habit, you could really make a big business out of it.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

It sounds like he was pretty disciplined in terms of not getting into other things. Like, did they make cigarettes or did they make um no lawnmowers or anything?

SPEAKER_00 33:48

I mean, they just they stuck with gum.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

That's hard to do in the 20th century when everybody else is is making everything, you know, and it and making my I mean he got to be a billionaire by chewing by chewing gum.

SPEAKER_00 34:02

Yeah, bought a baseball team. He bought he also, you know, his family actually owned uh Catalina Island off the coast of really yeah, yeah. And his uh one of his grandchildren donated it as a uh nature preserve, but he invested in Catalina Island, invested in some hotels and resorts out there. I love Catalina Island, that's one of my favorite places. I've never actually been there. Is it cool? Okay. Is that cool? Are there wild horses there? Is that where the wild horses are? Buffalo. Okay, okay. Well, yeah, that that I mean, I didn't really get too much into his his life. This was more about what he did in terms of the um the marketing and the sort of introduction of the brand to the United States, but that's uh William Wrigley Jr.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

Does the family still own the company?

SPEAKER_00 34:54

Yes, the family still owns um the majority of the company and his descendants, as I said, one of them uh donated Catalina Island. They're they're big philanthropists these days because they have the money to do that. But um, yeah, there's still there's still Wrigley's involved in Wrigley gum.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

If you think about it, like he was a contemporary of like Henry Ford, right? You know, and these two tycoons would get together, probably. And when you we've talked about Henry Ford before competition.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Do you want to stick a gum? I know it's not any flavor as long as it's spearment.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

It must have galled somebody like Henry Ford or some of these guys that really were, you know, when you think about you know, the being vexed by the combustion engine and trying to have all these work on all these engineering issues, and then this guy got there just by moving a lot of gum. Well, kind of like that.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

I he did have to come up with a way to to um well market it, of course, but also produce it in a way that it would stay fresh for a long time and a way that it would ultimately be very, very easy to sell, right? Sure. But it probably felt like child's play to a guy like Henry Ford. Yeah, yeah, I would agree.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

Tesla. And we know Henry Ford was a son of a bitch anyway, so you know.

SPEAKER_00 36:15

Well, that is our boy William Wrigley Jr. Next time you're in Chicago, uh give a nod to the building or to the to the Wrigley field. And next time you're in a convenience store, uh plunk down the probably $1.50 or $2 at this point it costs for a pack of um Wrigley's chewing gum.

SPEAKER_01 36:33

Yeah, pour out a pack of spearmint for us.

SPEAKER_00 36:36

All right. We'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_03 36:48

Down in Chicago, I took a stroll, saw a little shop with a heart of gold. William Wrigley Jr. had a clever plan. Put a sweet shoe grin, and every man's peppermint coolin' peppermint clean, juice to fruit pop like a carnival sing, double mint twins and a cherry smile, choosing chewing on a lady wild. From the lake unto the corn stand, everybody knew that bread. Old black wrapper, hear it crack. Once you stop, you won't go back. Chew, choose, wriggly gum. Sweet on your tongue, let the good times come. Chew, chew, wriggling gum. Flavor after flavor, make the whole time hump. Wriggling field and that candy tree. Chew, chew, wriggling. One little chew and the joy rose in the wriggle field when the crowd gets loud. Boys, then the bleach is almighty proud. Hop that beats the two tap to shoe everything tastes brand new. From the loop to the river bed, that's little chew you could recommend. Open the wide fun again. Every time you spin, two three dumb. Oh, you tell me that the good times come. Two two three dumb.