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The AFU and Urban Legend Archive Products Baby Ruth baby ruth candy bar
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The AFU and Urban Legend Archive Products Baby Ruth baby ruth candy bar
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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban,rec.sport.baseball,misc.int-property
From: thf2@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Ted Frank)
Subject: Baby Ruth bars and Babe Ruth
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 1994 15:37:53 GMT
In article <clays-101094082207@clays.dialup.access.net> clays@panix.com (Clay Shirky) writes:
>Hank Gillette) wrote:
>> Do you know what year the Baby Ruth candy bar came out?
>
>1920.
At which point Babe Ruth is no longer a pitcher, had already started setting home run records, so the comparison to Smokey Joe Wood is moot.
Even if it weren't moot, I don't think Gustafson recognizes the entirely different advertising standards of the day. It was *very* common for products to be named after famous people in the early twentieth century, with or without their permission. Whether Ruth was a superstar when the candy bar was named after him is hardly conclusive (though he certainly was -- he was a World Series hero who had set a record for consecutive shutout innings of pitching, and he had already shattered the seasonal home run record); he was a big enough celebrity that things would've been named after him anyway, and the candy bar took off in popularity right about the time that Babe Ruth *really* started having better years than the president.
Look: if I were to market Sharyn Stone Perfume, and then come up with a cockamamie tale that it's really named after the third cousin's daughter of the former dean of my law school, odds are that Sharon Stone could stop me in court in 1994. It's also unlikely that I could market an Indian food line named Adam Curry -- even famous trademark infringers have publicity rights in their name. Babe Ruth did not have the same legal right in his name in 1920, and the candy bar company never had to do more than come up with a story about a president's daughter of thiry years past -- who is even considering naming a product after Amy Carter or Julie Nixon Eisenhower or Truman's kid that played the piano?
The only evidence we have of the candy bar being named after Ruth Cleveland is the say-so of the candy bar company several years after the fact. Is there any contemporaneous advertising noting the connection? Were there many other products named after Ruth Cleveland so that the candy bar company's story becomes more plausible? Was Ruth Cleveland regularly referred to in the press of the 1910's as Baby Ruth? Did the sportswriters of the time, Ring Lardner and other verbose fellers among them, ever note the coincidence between Babe Ruth and Baby Ruth Cleveland, as they would've been prone to do if Ruth Cleveland was popularly and well-known as Baby Ruth Cleveland? None of the other evidence that one would expect to find if the candy bar company's story were true can be found.
I submit to you that the case for the candy bar being named after Babe Ruth is much better than the case for the candy bar being named after Ruth Cleveland.
Someone mentioned that Babe Ruth tried to make his own candy bar in 1930 and that the Baby Ruth company sued. It strikes me that this makes my version of events even more plausible -- the candy bar company now has a *reason* to fabricate a story about President Cleveland's daughter for the purposes of litigation. Otherwise, if they had admitted that the bar were named after the baseball player, they would not have been allowed to protect their trademark.
If someone can identify the Ruth Cleveland story surfacing well before the litigation did, that would certainly put a dent in my theory. Now that I know that such a lawsuit happened, I'd be really surprised to find that the story existed before 1927 or so.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: thf2@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Ted Frank)
Subject: Re: LSD and Baby Ruth
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 1994 22:37:16 GMT
In article <clays-101094124004@clays.dialup.access.net> clays@panix.com (Clay Shirky) writes:
>Ted Frank wrote:
>> Now, if Mr. Moore wants to reveal more from his book than the conclusion
>> (assuming that the book contains more than conclusions), we can discuss
>> that. Otherwise, I see no indication that he did more than fall for
>> the urban legend.
>
>Oh please, Len posted a second source and I posted a third.
No. All three of you posted sources that quoted the *same* source -- the candy bar company's original claim, and since this discussion is over whether that claim is *true*, it's like attempting to end a theological discussion over whether God exists by saying "But the Bible says so!" (but let's not get into that, shall we?). Not one of the sources did more than state a conclusion. While the sources had useful background facts, those facts do nothing to contradict the theory that the candy bar is named after Babe Ruth, and a lot to bolster it.
I'm sure I can find five or six books that mention the Chevy Nova in Mexico story as true. I know there are dozens of newspaper reports talking about the importance of X-raying Halloween candy. Edgar Odell Lovett Elementary sent my parents a printed warning about blue-star LSD tattoos. This is a.f.u., for crying out loud. How many times does it need to be noted that repetition of an urban legend, even in books with ISBN's, is not by itself evidence of the underlying voracity of the legend?
>Is all you have
>a conviction that all written material on the subject is wrong and you are
>right? You have seen three sources and posted none yourself; what's up with
>that?
I've posted a line of reasoning why the "daughter of Ruth Cleveland" story is implausible. The only gap in my line was *why* the candy bar company would lie -- you answered that with your source noting the litigation between the company and Babe Ruth over whether the latter could sell his own candy bar. I've put forward a half-dozen factual events that one would expect to find true if the candy bar company's version of events were true, and noted that none of those correlative facts exist.
So, on the one hand we have the candy bar company's wildly implausible, but oft-repeated, claim, a claim that has absolutely no corroborative evidence where one would expect to find it, and on the other hand we have a common-sense explanation of what really happened. While my words to Mr. Moore were arguably too harsh, I see no reason for the well-trained afuista not to be at least a wee-bit skeptical about a subject that, at a minimum, requires more research. Instead, Mr. Moore bootstrapped the original disputed claim and proclaimed the matter closed in a condescending post. I was entitled to be a bit peeved.
Again: is there any evidence of the Ruth Cleveland story other than the say-so of the company? In the case of the "Lucy in the Sky = LSD" legend, afu'ers, most notably snopes, found a hell of a lot of evidence corresponding with John Lennon's claim of coincidence. All I've seen so far is books quoting the candy bar company, when the question is whether we should be trusting the candy bar company.
From: hank_gillette@smtp.esl.com (Hank Gillette)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban,rec.sport.baseball,misc.int-property
Subject: Re: Baby Ruth bars and Babe Ruth
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 1994 01:11:52 -0700
In article <1994Oct10.153753.4421@midway.uchicago.edu>, thf2@midway.uchicago.edu wrote:
> At which point Babe Ruth is no longer a pitcher, had already started setting
> home run records, so the comparison to Smokey Joe Wood is moot.
[snip]
A little additional information which I think bolsters your (and my) belief. Bill James (the well-known baseball expert) says in the "Historical Baseball Abstract":
"I think few people understood, despite some qualified attempts to help them understand, the extent to which Ruth was a mythic figure even before 1920"
Hank "want a bite of my Julie bar?" Gillette
+=+=+=+=+=+=+
From _More Misinformation_ (Burnam, Tom. New York : Lippincott & Crowell, 1980):
" . . . According to the National Confectioners Association, it was named 'Baby Ruth' in honor of Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth, born in the White House.
However, a bit of chronology tends to throw certain doubts on this more or less "official" account. "Baby" Ruth Cleveland was born on October 3, 1891, and died of diphtheria on January 6, 1904. Cleveland himself died in 1908. The candy bar was not given its name until the early 1920s.
Another tale occasionally told is that the candy bar was named for an illegitimate child. Not so. True, as a bachelor Cleveland had an illegitimate child, the result of a liaison in Buffalo. But Ruth was born to Mrs. Cleveland, a lovely creature of twenty-one at the time of their marriage; she was the daughter of Cleveland's late law partner and had been Cleveland's ward since she was eleven. Cleveland was fifty-four when they married.
For whom, then, was the candy bar named? According to the syndicated columnist L. M. Boyd, it was named by Mrs. George Williamson, whose husband was president of the Williamson Candy Company and who herself helped develop the formula for the candy bar, in honor of their granddaughter: information supplied, says Mrs. Boyd, by a longtime family friend of the Williamsons."
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 7 August 1993 (Broeg, Bob. "At Microphone, Plate, Reggie's A Real Blast"):
". . . The Babe was the original Mr. October. Besides, there's a close candy-bar factor between Jackson and Ruth, too. Back in The Babe's day, a manufacturer brought out a short-lived 'Babe Ruth Home Run Bar.' The Curtiss Candy Co. threatened suit. You know, the name was too close to Curtiss' 'Baby Ruth.' The Babe scoffed, 'But I didn't complain when you named your candy bar after me.' Oh, no, Mr. Ruth, the candy company had named its candy bar after Grover Cleveland's daughter, the first child born to a president's family in the White House. The Babe was indignant. 'Well,' Mr. Ruth roared about Baby Ruth, 'I ain't eatin' your damned candy bar anymore.'"
From the Arizona Republic, February 13, 1993 (Sharon Kapnick. "Sweet Beginnings : How Some Famous Chocolate Treats Evolved to Stand the Taste of Time"):
In 1916, Otto Schnering founded the Curtiss Candy Co. in Chicago. He called his first effort -- a concoction with a pastry center topped with nuts and coated with chocolate -- Kandy Kake.
With it, Schnering just managed to get by -- until 1921, that is, when he rejiggered the confection into a log-shaped bar made of chocolate-covered caramel and peanuts.
Schnering named his bar Baby Ruth after President Cleveland's daughter Ruth, who had been the country's darling as a child in the White House in the late 1800s.
To promote the candy bar, Schnering gave away thousands in Chicago and other Midwestern cities. He then priced the bar at half the going candy-bar rate: Other bars sold for 10 cents; Baby Ruth cost 5.
From the Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1989 (Richard Sandomir. "Legacy of Earning Power : Babe Ruth: Dead 41 Years, He Lives on in Endorsements That Bring Heirs Hundreds of Thousands"):
When Ruth was the highest-paid player in baseball, the endorsement game was small. He got around more than any other star, endorsing a hat, a brand of cigar -- he puffed on them in the showroom window of the factory -- chewing tobacco, long johns, shoes, a watch and autographed balls given away by Texaco.
He also backed the short-lived Babe Ruth's Home Run Candy, which lost a legal fight with the makers of the Baby Ruth candy bar -- named not for the Babe, but for Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth -- and a Manhattan haberdashery, Babe Ruth's for Men, that shut its doors in six months.
From the New York Times, June 16, 1984,
To the Editor:
The "Baby Ruth" candy bar, says The New York Times in a "Correction" published on May 28, was not, as a May 21 news article had suggested, named after Babe Ruth but after the daughter of President Cleveland.
In his book "More Misinformation," Tom Burnam writes that chronology tends to throw doubt on this commonly held belief:
"'Baby' Ruth Cleveland was born on Oct. 3, 1891, and died of diphtheria on Jan. 6, 1904. Cleveland himself died in 1908. The candy bar was not given its name until the early 1920's. . . .
"According to the syndicated columnist L. M. Boyd, it was named by Mrs. George Williamson, whose husband was president of the Williamson Candy Company and who herself helped develop the formula for the candy bar, in honor of their granddaughter; information supplied, says Mr. Boyd, by a longtime family friend of the Williamsons."
From _Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend_ (Wagenheim, Kal. New York : Praeger Publishers, 1974):
"That year [1921] the Baby Ruth candy bar came out on the market, and hundreds of children sent him the wrappers, asking for his autograph. Ruth demanded royalties for this apparently blatant use of his name but was turned down in the courts. Years later, when he tried to put his own 'Ruth's Home Run Candy' on the market, the Curtiss Candy Company, manufacturers of Baby Ruth, persuaded the patent office to turn him down on the grounds that the new product would cause confusion among candy buyers. In 1973 an inquiry was sent to Curtiss's main office in Chicago and brought this reply:
Our candy bar made its initial appearance in 1921, some years before Babe Ruth . . . became famous. The similarity of names, therefore, is purely coincidental. Our candy bar was actually named after President Cleveland's daughter, Baby Ruth Cleveland, who visited the Curtiss Company Plant years ago when the company was getting started and this largely influenced the company's founder to name the candy bar "Baby Ruth."
Cleveland hadn't been president for nearly a quarter of a century when his daughter was so honored, and Ruth was clearly famous by 1921; in fact, his exploits dominated the front page of every afternoon daily in New York, even overshadowing President Harding and other nationally important figures."
Also see:
Broekel, Ray. _The Great American Candy Bar Book_. Boston : Houghton
Mifflin,, 1982.
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