Sunday, February 21, 2016

BobRo Archives: Twinkies

A cartoon in a recent issue of The New Yorker shows a "School Lunch Reunion" with two very wrinkled pieces of fruit conversing with a normal-looking snack cake. One of the fruits says, "Twinkie, you look great. How do you do it?" This reminded me of a long-ago Twinkie tale, reprinted below from a 2002 column:

            Back in 1976, DC, with the help of then-New York convention king and distribution guru Phil Seuling, decided to run a convention at NYC’s Commodore Hotel to celebrate Superman’s birthday. The plans were plagued with problems, the most severe being a strike by hotel workers the day before the convention, prompting a last-minute move to the Americana Hotel.
            DC President Sol Harrison convinced Hostess Bakeries, makers of Cupcakes, Fruit Pies and Twinkies, to donate some baked goods as door prizes. However, I don’t think even Sol expected that we would get quite so many Twinkies. Boxes and boxes of the creme-filled cakes, enough to fill two canvas mail bins, arrived at the hotel!
At first, we were giving a Twinkie or two to each person who came through the door… nothing like a little sugar fix to rev you up for a convention! But by the second day, it was obvious that we had a lot more Twinkies than we had convention-goers, so we started to give out boxes of ten.
Even that didn’t seem to make a dent in the supply! By the end of the convention, we were handing people as many boxes of Twinkies as they could carry. Comics dealers were given cartons of them. DC staffers got as many as they could carry. And the rest ended up in the DC office, where anybody who could still stand to look at one could enjoy it as a snack.

I have to wonder if any of the attendees decided to keep their souvenir Twinkie rather than eat it and, if so, what condition is it in today?

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