Print Solutions Magazine

Bob Lettieri, a retired forms salesman, handed out more than $5,000 worth of classic Bazooka bubblegum a year to prospects, clients and strangers, until manufacturer Topps Company changed the gum’s recipe and packaging.

Start with a simple recipe: sugar, citric acid, corn syrup, gum acacia, flavoring and a splash of the color E-129, also known as Allura Red AC. Then mix, weigh, dry and cut into tiny pieces, wrap in postage-stamp-size comics, and call it Bazooka bubblegum.

This formula has been the blueprint for one of America’s most cherished and iconic confections since the Second World War. The New York-based Topps Company, owner of the Bazooka brand, has mixed the same batch of gum wrapped in the same cartoons in the same northeast Pennsylvania factory for generations. Mess with the formula, and you’ve messed with history. Worse, it’s not Bazooka.

This is the charge that’s been leveled by Bob Lettieri, Willimantic, Conn., who was formerly a salesman at Arrow Business Forms and Royal Business Forms, now closed. Lettieri has been “the Bazooka guy” since 1967, when he began passing out more than $5,000 worth of the classic gum annually to clients and prospects. Early this spring, Topps changed Bazooka's recipe, packaging and manufacturing. Lettieri is at a loss.

“I am just in crisis over this,” Letteiri says. “The gum is now this saltwater taffy-looking thing. It sticks to the wrapper. You can't read the comic.” Now, he winces, people refuse the gum. He can’t remember that happening before.

The gum gimmick started as a joke many years ago, he says, when a receptionist asked him, “How would you like to have something you haven’t had in a long time?” She offered him a piece of Bazooka, which reminded him of his childhood, and he adopted the line himself. He's retired now, but he reps for an abrasives company part time and still enjoys passing out the candy wherever he goes.

Over the years, offering gum evolved from a clever sales strategy to part of Lettieri's identity. People everywhere—sales clerks, bank tellers, children—knew him as the gum guy. It filled tubs in his home and decorated his car. On Lettieri's first night ever in Orlando, Fla., a waitress surprised him by recognizing his face. “Hey! You’re the gum guy!” she said.

All of this made Letteiri Bazooka’s biggest cheerleader. In a second, he can recite the entire history of the Topps Company, and he references the company's founding brothers—Abram, Ira, Phil and Joe—like they just finished a round of golf together.

“I’ve got a thousand stories,” Letteiri boasts. One of his favorites is how half a dozen pieces of Bazooka got his party of six seated at a crowded popular restaurant. Or the time nuns at Letteiri's parents’ nursing home staged a bubble-blowing competition. “Bazooka rules!” he laughs.

Or it did, he says, until this spring. Topps marketing materials promise a “softer chew and longer-lasting” gum, which is now made in Mexico. The original fruit flavors of strawberry and grape have been replaced by watermelon and cotton candy, and the stick is a different shape. Previously, the distinctive grooves of Bazooka reflected a humorous musical instrument known as a bazooka, made from tubes and a funnel, built by Bob Burns in the 1930s. It was this instrument that gave the WWII rocket and mortar tube weapon its name. Topps Company representatives did not return calls for this story, but Lettieri says a focus group of young people convinced executives it was time for a brand change.

He’s tried to petition the Topps Company to change back, but they have been unresponsive, he says. He's tried to buy up existing quantities of Bazooka gum online, but the price of old-style Bazooka has skyrocketed in recent months. So Lettieri has begun a petition, launched a blog, and lobbied “Good Morning America” to give airtime to the “crisis.”

“Of course I’m realistic,” Lettieri says. “Some things have come back—Speedy Gonzales, classic Coke—but not everything can. I just want the name of the individual sitting in a cubicle in New York who made this decision. ”

In the event of defeat, will Lettieri switch brands? Does he have a second-favorite gum? Not really, he admits. In fact, he hasn't chewed much gum since he was a kid. “I was driving down the highway a few years ago,” he remembers. “Big mirrored sunglasses, convertible, moustache. I blew a bubble and it was all over my face. You just can't chew gum with a moustache.”

It’s the idea of the original gum, he protests, that’s a national institution. “Fine, make the new one. But keep the old one, even if it loses money. It’s like apple pie and the American flag. These things just can’t disappear from America.”

—Rebecca Trela