When I was in third grade, the class troublemaker started a rumor that a certain brand of chewing gum, a very popular flavor at the time, had spider eggs in it.
We all had gum. Of course we did.
It wasn’t allowed in class, but this was back when lunch was followed by something called “recess”. Lunch was a half hour, and “recess” was also a half hour, because back then a lot of kids would walk home for lunch and come back again after. When the weather was good we got to go outside on the “blacktop” for recess, and amuse ourselves. This being the sixties, the boys usually played kickball and the girls played hopscotch, jump-rope, and similar. Or tag, or Red Rover, or something local called Swinging Statues, where you held someone’s hand and they swung you in a circle and let you go, and you had to freeze in position after you stopped stumbling. Weirdest pose won. Yeah, we were a little strange.
Sometimes I played, sometimes I would sit and read. And even I had my trusty pack of chewing gum. My favorite brand and flavor was the very one my classmate accused of spider eggery. The teachers patrolling recess were indulgent, as long as the gum went into the wastebasket before the kid went back into the school, and no gum wrappers were thrown onto the “blacktop”.
I could get through a whole five-stick pack at recess; you chewed a stick til it lost its flavor, then started a new one. To this day I have no idea if the teachers heard the spider egg rumor or not, but I don’t recall any of them talking to any of us about it.
Would you believe, almost every kid in my class threw out their chewing gum — whole unopened packs — over the spider egg hoax. And the rumor spread, till every kid was divesting themselves of their cherished Chiclets or Wrigley’s or Beech-Nut. Regardless of flavor, regardless of brand. It was a Chewing-Gum-Throwing-Out Movement. And for at least the next couple of weeks I and a couple other kids were the only ones snapping our gum on the blacktop during recess.
We got told we’d have spiders hatching in our tummies, we got told all kinds of crazy silly nonsense. None of which happened, of course, because the whole thing was a lie from start to finish, never mind biology. But boy did we get sales pressure.
I admit I was a bug nut as a kid, big time. But you didn’t have to be a bug nut to be able to open a pack of gum and observe, even as young as third grade, that there were clearly no spider eggs, or egg sacs, or spiderlings, or even escape webbing, anywhere near the thing. The whole thing was ridiculous.
It was obvious, or should have been, that the kid who started the story was just a malicious liar. But panic ruled the day. And a bunch of kids threw away perfectly good treats they’d paid for out of their own allowances.
I never forgot just how foolish “normal” people can be with just a tiny bit of encouragement from malevolent people. Of course, back then, it was just a bunch of silly kids throwing out perfectly good gum. Today? It’s a crisis in American history.
Yeah, Joe Biden’s job performance has spider eggs in it.
And no, he’s not the candidate with the history of neurocysticercosis, either.
Tell me another one.