The Audacity of Gumption

John Haines

When I was a kid, I dreamed of inventing a chewing gum that would never lose its flavor. I would deliver the gift of yum-yum ad infinitum in every wad and for all the world.

It was the sixties, I was young -- post-Dr. Seuss, pre-Mad Magazine young – and I was a devout dreamer. While it is generally accepted that most children of this age possess an innate ability to stretch their naturally elastic realities on demand, there was a pair of seriously sniffy teachers who nevertheless found a way to pooh-pooh most every stretch I made.

Mr. Sniffy just didn't dig the way I conducted my day-to-day operations, suggesting that I was living in a world of my own creation just so I could crown myself king of everything. At that, I shrugged... something that caused Sniffalopolus to turn hostile toward some girl named Pollyanna, whom he seemed to think I knew. We didn't have a Pollyanna in our class, so I just kind of smiled at the freak and let it go. Later in class, however, when he was rambling on about the Vietnam War, he suddenly spun like a gunfighter and fired a question at me. It was quite the maneuver; the class laughed, and I smothered a chuckle before asking him to repeat the question. The effort for him to do so seemed excruciating. Perhaps that pirouette took it out of him. He was not pleased when I answered correctly, and accused me of being "lost in space," necessitating the restatement of the question. When I replied that I was "just thinking," he said, "You weren't thinking -- you were daydreaming."

I considered explaining that people like him might confuse my practical strategy for jacking up the significance of any given minute with some silly dependency on the make-believe world, but then quickly realized that anyone who needed to have "thinking" explained to them wasn't going to get it anyway.

Mr. Sniffy Jr. went a different route – a parent-teacher conference. There, he used a lot of big words and told my parents that I was prone to “episodic woolgathering.” Seriously. Wool made me sneeze; why would I want to gather it? My dad summed up the meeting using only Bruce Springsteen's initials.

That said, dealing with an educator's critical overreach does condition a kid for “come what may.” The persistently critical tend to fill their needy places with large quantities of dismay and doubt draped in showy intellect and the condescension common to godlings, many possessing a supernatural ability to suddenly appear as neighbors, in-laws, or bosses just to shake up moments of sustained peace. Early exposure is often the best vaccine. Even now I remain grateful to have been case-hardened to the cryptic twaddle of wannabe or haftabe critics. The lesson was in learning to consider the source. And while I can't say the lessons of my formative years got me all hopped up and loaded for (the hard to) bear as an adult, they did help me figure out when not to feed them – and when to feed them purely for the sport of it.

The truth was, such criticism could have been just as easily turned upon the critics themselves. Señor Sniffy once duped me into sharing some of the key action scenes in my “go-to thinking," and then, nodding, half-laughed as he declared them "predictable exaggerations for youthful amusement." Again, I only shrugged, but I let the words sink in. Wow, I thought. Brilliant. I charged Mr. Sniffy with first degree obviousness and sentenced him to an immediate conscientious objection. I wasn't much for the cheek-turning "sticks and stones" thing, so I came hard and salty with an eviscerating twist on the ol' "I'm rubber, you're glue" chestnut. I regret that I can't share this with you now for fear of it falling into the wrong hands. There are people who may never recover.

The health benefits of constructive situational levity were getting seriously undervalued amid all that late-60s clamoring for peace and love. I even began to suspect my sweet and outwardly groovy 5^th grade teacher of being not so groovy after all when she turned outwardly huffy because I nominated Milton Bradley for President in the class mock election in '68. I was singled out (which was fine, and maybe even a goal) and accused of inappropriate behavior for "whipping up" support for the board game baron's candidacy and thus "making a mockery" of the, uh, mock election. When I said that anyone who could come up with Battleship, Stratego and Mouse Trap might just make a pretty good Commander-in-Chief, I received a near standing ovation from the class.

Not, however, from the head of the class. I was rewarded for my patriotic concern by being stripped of my recess rights for an entire week. Still, I found myself buoyed by the strains of distant laughter and other sounds of freedom that wafted through the windowless halls of Holy Apostles Grade School. Such punishment only rejuvenated my imagination and bolstered my resolve. On the other side of the world, a future Nobel Peace Prize winner was also being held unjustly captive. In fact, it is quite likely that a man called Madiba -- aka Nelson Mandela -- was having it even worse.

Fortunately, as I got a little older -- about the time I started to get, and actually get Mad Magazine -- other teachers encouraged me to cultivate my chronic Pretendinitis, and stood strong on truth, justice and the imaginary way. I got good grades and managed to stay within a casually stretched Slinky Jr. of The Golden Rule. Whether or not my "thinking" had work-product immunity, the resulting images did, and still do, belong to me. By that time I had my arguments down. My portable feel-good reveries were nothing more than personal little indie flicks – starring me, directed by me, for an audience of me, conveniently upconverted and stored in my right hemisphere for as-needed enjoyment. The themes were simple and innocent and classic: me performing baseball heroics, or me coming up with cool inventions, or me safely piloting a twin-engine Airbus to an emergency river landing should Canada ever attack us with their geese. Or -- eschewing all humility for a moment -- me unleashing some killer classroom improv until even the iciest of prepubescent playground divas had no choice but to laugh out loud and accept their place as vestal putty in my knowing hands.

Fanfare for the common kid is all it was. Innovative yet orthodox in the Trix are for kids tradition. Classics within the demographic.

But it wasn't always all about me, lest some thoughtful reader think me self-absorbed. There was, within my regular rotation, a fantasy that I couldn't shake -- something I allowed to go on not just for me, but for the sake of an entire generation of teeth-bearing children just yearning for fast and lasting flavor. A fantasy where time collides with worlds uniting and the global glucose supply meets sweet-tooth demand and the Sixties spirit of free love merges with the story of the fishes and the loaves and everything becomes on Earth as it is in Heaven, where bubblegum of all colors, shapes, and everlasting flavors would be forever free to every kid who wasn't a jerk. Today, this vision might be called an overly optimistic stimulus plan, but, dadgummit, developmental dollars are hard to come by.

Ah, but those were magical times, Hasbro/Wham-O, Hanna-Barbera, Mark Goodson/Bill Todman Production times. Everything seemed possible and bolts of inspiration could be found in almost anything – including a variety of chemicals and entirely new ways of thinking. We were a bolder, wiser kind of youth not yet burdened by reality or responsibility, and so the time seemed right to experiment a little. Upon reflection, it should have come as no surprise that some of us would fall heavily under the influence of not only the zeitgeist, but also a highly potent substance associated with those lofty times. Those choices were ours to make; they would change us forever and – naysayers be damned -- for the better. Spirited and young and fearing no frontier, we eagerly invited the unknown, we took chances on new things in a new world, and found ourselves opening up to -- and ultimately embracing -- the deeper themes and various matters featured in a seminal sixties movie called The Absent-minded Professor. That movie was, like my heyday daydreams, inspiring. Critics are still pretty much in agreement that Fred MacMurray's nuanced portrayal of Professor Ned Brainard remains among the most even-handed performances ever turned in by a level-headed actor tackling a memory-challenged role. (So great is the film, The Professor enjoyed not only a re-release and a sequel, but a sequel that was remade twice -- once for TV.)

If you're too young or too old to recall, trust me, any reasonably entrepreneurial kid with an open mind was likely to be swayed by the Disney classic and its galvanizing message of hope. The conceptual vagaries of an artistically licensed H = U + pV energy/pressure/volume formula throughout the flick was not only highly provocative but fiscally seductive. Me? I was a goner -- in the barrel and over the falls. Especially once I pondered the overall commercial potential of a certain proprietary visco-elastic fabrication that the world would come to know by its brand name -- Flubber. Besides the scientific mumbo jumbo, the allure was about creating something that gave us a unifying purpose, a sense of possibility, the feeling we could change the world. Every active ingredient needed to fully embrace "the audacity of hope."

And Flubber did represent hope. The stored energy within the wonder rubber somehow expanded young minds so they could learn more about life and how to manage the obsessions that often came with success or at least the anticipation of it. The realization of these lessons didn’t always hit us – my friends, siblings, and cousins – until much later in life. Sure, a kid can walk dogs, do dishes, cut lawns, wash cars or push street corner Tang to earn their fun money. Life isn't free, but there's nothing like the feeling you get when you take a new or improved product to market and earn the right to fret over venture capital, seed money, royalties, private offerings, strategic outsourcing and just-in-time delivery. Hell, how's any self-respecting pre-teen mover/shaker ever going to learn to manage risk, deconstruct paradigms, and/or compartmentalize to their true potential?

And so my dreams evolved to fit the moment of my Flubberian experience. Not only did I want to enjoy gum that would never lose its flavor, I also wanted to be the one to actually invent the stuff and bring it to the world. As anyone who's ever stopped to read the Successories motivational posters at their local mall can tell you, to do anything great, you must dream it first. Obviously, there’s more to it than just that; but we must at least consider that dreaming could be the genesis of greatness or at least the nemesis of irrelevance. Dreaming is much more than simply a form of wishful thinking. In fact, certain influences within American pop culture have relegated wishful thinking to a place below even the rather dubious fat chance (which differs from slim chance, how?) in the category of quantifiable haplessness according to a recent Cornell study on half-assed behavior by a team of borderline experts in so-so performance. Countering this, a group of former Yale Deconstructionists now maintains that the purposeful wishful thinking is more accurate than wishful thinking, but then quickly warns of the risks involved "any time adjectives are given too much responsibility."

Again, whatever. Willful dreaming, purposeful thinking, or vision-driven action plan… pick one. It all adds up to recurring images that eventually burn into the brain and become a blueprint for future achievements. It wasn't enough for me to simply have the vision. No. The idea of never-ending flavor in a single wad of gum was neat, if not noble or even all that original. Execution, however, was the challenge. The damn details. And details are not just little things dangling off the back of a Mexican Hairless puppy -- details are big, amorphous, and problematic. So much so that details are spotted with both God and the Devil. Quite the range, details have.

I was naïve. I had no idea what to do after proffering what turned out to be a well received, if not particularly new idea, other than to talk about it and bask in the mere idea of a miraculous confection for as long there was some return on the pitch. (Believe me, until I previewed this dissertation on daydreams and confectionary lifespan with a friend, I had never even heard of Willy Wonka's Everlasting Gobstopper.) That said, my “go-to thinking" differed from a lot of flights of fancy in that they at least nibbled at the potential for eventual achievability. I do understand the difference between daydreams and pipe dreams.

But I didn't have a clear gum plan. I did, however, have a name for my would-be gum. It was a word my mother used a lot, and one that we, her kids, rather enjoyed. The word was "Gumption." Gumption was second only to instigator and just ahead of crème de coco and kohlrabi in the fun-to-say category of my youth. And so I decided to honor my mom and market my bite-sized quasi-flubber flavor conveyors under the brand name of "Gumption." At minimum, it was fun to bandy about and thus delay the headache of having to develop a mass producible, commercially viable version.

But that all quickly changed. Having succumbed to the inevitable puffery that befalls even semi-humble visionaries and prophets, I boasted of my Gumption idea to my uncle Bob, a creature we called “Uncle Whale.”

"You're nuts," said Uncle Whale, a guy, who despite his mammoth stature, was only nine years older than me. "That's just dumb."

Assuming he was marine green with envy, I stayed calm. Epistemological debate wasn't for everybody, much less some sea mammal talking out his blowhole.

"Hey," said the Whale, "it's not that inventing a gum that gives and gives and asks nothing in return is bad. It's just that it's a loser of a business."

"What?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "I know there's some junk I need to work out…"

"Ever hear of planned obsolescence?" interrupted Uncle Humpback. Who's going to manufacture something like that? It's cheap, disposable. Ain't supposed to last."

"Huh?"

"Yeah," said the Blubber Source, "it's one and done if you're careful. Just put the wad on your dresser at night and on your plate during meals. Warm it up with spit and chew it whenever you want. Why buy more if a little dab'll do ya'."

"But the flavor, it would be so…you know…flavorful." I saw the big picture before finishing the pitiful sentence.

"Besides," said Moby the Dick, "there's no such thing as gum like that. How you gonna make it-- with magic?" He was laughing. "You always just gonna make it up as you go, kid?"

The way he said it, said it all. I was a kid, acting like a kid. My vision, again, pooh-poohed. Gumption was dead. Or was it?

Fast forward to today and the work-a-day world, a new reality unfolding with new-fangled dreams enhanced from decades of practice. I got a job selling paperboard packaging. Folding cartons. Laypeople call them boxes. Mostly food packaging; things like breakfast cereal, frozen pizza, mac and cheese, and a variety of fast and easy microwaveable products. National brands and private labels; new products and old faves; medical, cosmetic, hardware, toys and tissue too; but mostly food. The woes of our economy notwithstanding, people still tend to buy food – particularly cheap and easy to prepare food.

As a part of the consumer packaging world, I felt I had a role in invigorating our nation's economy, and I was well-positioned to measure the relative real-time state of it. There are worse gigs. I think most of us have heard of Bruce Springsteen's comment about why he does what he does. The Boss, no doubt in that famous rasp of his, said something like

"I'm a guy who goes to work each day like everybody else, man. You know, workin' on a dream, try to make it real. I just happen to play rock and roll for a living. I'm enough of a realist to know there's only so many jobs in value-added market-effective consumer packaging, so I stick with what I know, you know. Like in a song I wrote a long time ago…'I'm a rocker, baby, I'm a rocker, ever-E-day.' I mean, I'm no different than any other guy who's dreamed of bein' on the cover of a Wheatie's box; but, man how cool would it be to be part of a group that actually creates something that powerful, talkin' about that brilliant orange double-bumped on recycled boxboard. Still the most iconic package in America, man. Gives me chills just seein' it on the shelf, like it's on a stage or somethin'."

Okay, it might not be an exact quote from Bruce there, but as they say, it’s close enough for rock 'n roll. My point: I'm fortunate. For it was through this job that the ghosts of Gumption were resurrected and a blast of wind was fired under the wings of dreams I've dreamed for so long.

It goes a little like this.

I found myself calling on a start-up company that had two new and innovative products for which patents were pending. The proprietary products happened to be shelf-stable cookie and brownie dough (SSD) and frozen microwaveable bread dough (FMD). The cookie dough was delicious, had no preservatives, and could be transported, stored, and sold in places without refrigeration. The US military (reportedly the world's single largest purchaser of cookie dough), Europe (limited reefer trucks), convenience stores, fund raisers, and college dorms were natural markets along with the conventional forces in Big Food and Grocery Nation. The frozen microwavable dough actually browns and rises in minutes and can instantly fill a kitchen with the smell of freshly baked bread, the Holy Grail in a world that craves culinary wizardry and competitive advantage. Restaurants and food service operations could save energy and oven space and waste far less in the preparation of their rolls, buns, and loaves. Hot Pocket type sandwiches and stylized bread bowls had enormous potential too.

Not only did I have the opportunity to provide the packaging for many of these items, but just as tasty was the chance to invest in them, to get in on the ground floor and purchase shares of stock in a private placement offering where, hopefully, one of the envious forces in Big Food would pay a katrillion dollars for the rights to these food technology patents. Beats wasting dollars on the NYSE. For more than one reason, I lovingly began to call SSD and FMD,"Magic Dough."

Magic Dough would be a financial double dip for me, a kick ass investment to go with huge packaging potential. Moreover, I'd be close to the action as it unfolded. Over a single summer, I shared what I knew about Magic Dough with a couple dozen friends and my company's principals, most of whom then also got in on the action, a group that collectively accounted for well over a half million investment dollars, at a time when the company desperately needed funding by virtue of the fact that the venture revolved around -- much like my beloved Gumption -- little more than an idea, albeit an idea far enough along to have been successfully produced in laboratory conditions. Commercialization – those devilish details -- would take some time; but after three years of costly R & D, and my company's countless packaging innovations, designs, prototypes, samples and revisions – some meriting patent applications and all of it done gratis for the benefit of Magic Dough -- it did indeed get done. Magical Dough is just beginning to enter some major retail markets, cookie dough first, with microwavable brownies hot on its heels.

But a funny thing happened on that oh so onerous road to an open market patrolled by Big Food, with all its grocery aisle graft and slotting fees and pricey, come-hither packaging graphics. Along the way, the owners of the dough patents, one of them with whom I've become good friends, hired some honchos from the woolly-bully world of Big Food to run the company and deal with such realities, or more accurately, realty. These were smart guys who'd been there, done that. I celebrated their arrival and shared as much with my consortium of friends and investor pals.

Okay, I lied. It wasn't a particularly funny thing that occurred on that road. Long story slashed obscenely short, in late 2008, I was called into my boss's office and was told that the president of the company marketing these high-tech doughs (one of the hired guns, and someone with whom I’d had almost no dealings), requested that I be removed as their packaging rep. "Conflict of interest," I was told; nothing personal of course. But nary a word has since come from anyone in the company for which I did all I could think of creatively, professionally, and in the spirit of “whatever-it-takes” to help them. Some have speculated that it had to do with my being too close to both the company's state of affairs and the consortium of investors that came through me. Be that as it may, I don't know how my multi-faceted assistance could manifest even a fraction of a microscopic wisp of a halfway decent reason for such a decision. Too bad. I was done as their rep. My ouster seemed like a preposterous snippet from a way too funky dream. I became, once again, the poor man's Madiba.

Unlike most others in the land of Magic Dough, my motivations were only partly financial. The way I'm wired, it was about a lot more than just the money, important as it is, what with kids and college harmonizing with my home's amazingly unfixable roof. You see, for me, Magic Dough was the collective embodiment of so much: Flubber, Gumption, Pollyanna, Milton Bradley, Nelson Mandela, Mr. Sniffy and Sniffy Jr., friends, family, Uncle Whale and allegations of "episodic woolgathering," all coming together in the sweetest, touch 'em all grand slam dream of the post-steroid era; all happening to the soundtrack of a Presidential campaign based on hope, and the audacity to hold it close. But -- no. Now? Magic Dough is only about the money, nothing more. C'este la vie.

Had I not been otherworldly mature and otherwise philosophical in handling this whole matter, I might have gone back at the Doughboys with my hard and salty twist on the "I'm rubber/you're glue" bromide. But I did not. That kind of recourse doesn't fly anymore, not even at Gitmo.

And so I had my stock and then took stock: of dreams and thinking and make-believe worlds, Gumption and Magic Dough, inventions and high hopes. It was time to come full cycle, to invent realities and stretch 'em out, to tell stories. To… write. Just make shit up, you know, like I always have, going way back to my grade school days when I wandered through the laneways of my imagination "for the sake of youthful amusement." A chance to tell the truth through made up stories. Something I still depend upon. What better way to deliver on promise disguised as the concerns of a couple of ornery educators and myriad others lacking the derring-do to believe in the power of daydreams and the gumption to turn them into something tangible.

I wrote. And I wrote and rewrote tenfold. Weekends and evenings. I persisted with the first agent I queried, a big-time publishing guy who put my first manuscript, a novel called DANNY MO, in the hands of a VP at a large NY publishing house. This editor read all 600-plus pages and replied two weeks later via email that the book was way too long but very well written, and that he'd consider it for publication if I'd make some cuts and rewrite the ending. I pouted briefly, over the thought of changing my beloved ending, but reconsidered eventually, and provided a new and, yeah, probably better, finish to the story. And while I cling to this publisher's last two economical emails promising that "a decision is coming" and "Danny remains on our radar," only time will tell. Sadly, there's no getting around the fact that, right now, everyone who still has a job in publishing is busy calling audibles and trying to survive some darkening days in an already skittish industry. But regardless of whether this venerable New York publisher publishes or rejects my story, the definitive reward will -- as with all my "thinking" back in the day – come through the realization that the act of dreaming up scenarios and the sharing them with others can indeed come into being. DANNY MO represents plenty of thinking and doing, and no shortage of effort. And if you've made it this far in this piece, if you've read to the end of The Audacity of Gumption, you know full well that for gumption to be gumption, perseverance is a must, and it must go on until at least one more little indie flick comes to life.