In 1928, a junior accountant at the Frank H. Fleer Co. developed the gooey pink substance that was to become the joy of school children and the bane of their teachers - bubble gum.
Sixty-seven years later, Fleer Corp. has closed the plant where Walter Diemer's creation - Dubble Bubble Gum - was first mass-produced and will instead focus on sports and collectible trading cards.Fleer is the latest in a string of companies that have abandoned factories and towns they called home for decades and moved their production elsewhere.
Dubble Bubble and other candy will be made in an existing Fleer factory in Byhalia, Miss., company spokeswoman Sonia Moyer said.
Employees reporting for work Monday found the North Philadelphia plant locked up. The roughly 90 workers - whose salaries averaged $24,000 a year - were allowed inside and given the bad news.
"It was like a wake," said Barry Fields, secretary-treasurer of Local 6 of the Bakery Confectionery and Tobacco Workers International Union.
The telltale signs may have been in the figures. Fleer sold $38 million worth of gum and candy in 1994, but it sold $245 million worth of trading cards.
Fleer and other gum companies began including trading cards of sports figures as a way to sell more gum, but they eventually found that the cards were much more in demand than the gum.