A brief treatise on the Tootsie Roll

It’s Tootsie-Roll-O’Clock at my desk and I am fresh out.

Some may call them second or even third-tier candies, but if Margo Madison in For All Mankind can binge-eat them, so can I.

Why Tootsie Rolls?

Straightening up one afternoon, I discovered three unopened bags of Halloween candy hiding on the hall tree beneath layers of coats. One had the usual top-tier candies (gone now, of course), one had mostly sour candies (not my jam), and the other was a variety pack of these lower-tier sweets with a good volume of Tootsie Rolls that I have nibbled away at, day by day, when my energy starts to flag.

But now that they’re gone I did what any reasonable person would do: I’ve moved on to the Tootsie Pops.

Thinking about Tootsie Pops got me thinking about the iconic commercial. It was written in 1969 by Jerry Bernstein, a copywriter and advertising executive. Just 200 words to pave his road to fame with Tootsie Pops. Six voices. Sixty seconds.

Like Mr. Cow, Mr. Fox, Mr. Turtle, and Mr. Owl who came before me: I don’t really care about the hard candy coating. In fact, I’m not a sucker for suckers, and Tootsie Pops are really too big unless you don’t mind feeling like a chipmunk. But there’s a nostalgia factor. If you’re of a certain age—or even if you’re not, because the commercial’s been running longer than I’ve been alive—one cannot eat a Tootsie Pop without asking the inevitable question: How many licks to get to the center?

So how many licks does it really take? Wikipedia says:

A student study by Purdue University concluded that it took an average of 365 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop using a "licking machine", while it took an average of 253 licks when tried by 20 students.^[16][17] Yet another study by the University of Michigan concluded that it takes 412 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. A 1996 study by undergraduate students at Swarthmore College concluded that it takes a median of 146 licks (range 70–222) to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

The Tootsie Pop was invented in 1931, but what about The Tootsie Roll? When was it invented, and by whom? While some of the details are in dispute, the confirmed facts are that Leo Hirschfield (or Hirschfeld), an Austrian American candy maker, created it as a penny candy in 1896 (or 1907) and named it for his daughter Clara using her nickname, Tootsie. Sadly, Leo’s end was not so sweet.

Nevertheless, he too left his mark—if not in words, then in cavities.