Apparently chewing gum in middle school is a much smaller deal now than it used to be. My sons report that, while they can’t chew gum everywhere on campus, there are some classrooms where it is just fine.
When I was a kid, it was verboten everywhere at school. If you were caught, you just hoped you would have to throw it away and that would be it. Sometimes it was a go-to-the-office offense. And sometimes, the teacher would make you stick your gum on your nose and sit in class that way for a time.
So there wasn’t much gum around during the school day, but a lot of kids wanted it. It was sweet, and it was forbidden. About halfway through eighth grade, I started acting productively on that.
Lunch was $1. Generally my mom gave me a dollar bill before I went to catch the bus. Most days the bus got to school a full 30 minutes before I had to be in class. So I would walk to the grocery store (yeah, try that today), where I could buy three packs of bubble gum for 96¢.
There were three brands of premium bubble gum: Bubble Yum, Bubblicious, and Hubba Bubba. Each came five pieces to a pack, and in different flavors. A piece of gum for which I’d paid a little more than 6¢ before the school day started was worth 25¢ in the middle of study hall.
So several days a week, I turned my lunch money into $3.75 in bubble gum. On a perfect day I went home with $2.79 in my pocket (after eating lunch). Usually it didn’t work out that way, because a) I didn’t often sell out; and b) I rarely had the discipline to stay out of my inventory myself. (If only I’d seen Scarface.)
I was getting a $10 allowance every other week by this point, but it was tough to build a music library (almost all I spent my money on) with just that. My illicit bubble gum trade definitely helped.
photo credit: Hubba Bubba via photopin (license)
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