June 13, 2022 – Theme Week Day 1

With gas prices as high as they are right now, road trips might not be a possibility this summer. So this week, we’re doing a theme week on Weird Roadside Attractions: New York State Edition! Did you know the largest roll of Life Savers can be found right here in New York? It’s a giant 10 foot long roll of Pep-O-Mint Life Savers, and can be found in Gouverneur, NY (which is located between the Adirondacks and the Thousand Islands). Seems like a random place to find a huge roll of Life Savers, but Gouverneur was the hometown of Edward Noble, who ran the Life Saver company for many years, and would later go on to found the American Broadcasting Company in 1943.
Life Savers were first created in 1912 by an Ohio candy maker named Clarence Crane. He started out in the maple sugar business and switched to chocolates. The problem was that his chocolates didn’t sell very well in the summer, because air conditioning was rare at the time, so his candies melted easily. So he decided to try making hard candy. At his local pharmacy, he noticed the pill making machine, which produced flat, round pills. He realized that the same machine could be used to make flat, round peppermints, which was a unique idea at the time, since most mints were imported and square shaped.
Noble bought a roll of Life Savers and approached Crane with his ideas to advertise and market the product. However, Crane wasn’t interested, and instead decided to sell Noble the rights to Life Savers for $2900 in 1913. Within 12 years, Noble had grown the company into a $1.5 million corporation. He packaged the mints in tinfoil to so they would stay dry and to keep them from going stale. Six other flavors were developed by 1919. He sold his products near the cash registers at cigar stores, saloons, restaurants, barber shops, and drug stores. He encouraged these places to always give customers a nickel with their change to help sales of the 5 cent Life Savers.
The classic 5 fruit flavor rolls were introduced in 1935, which included pineapple, lime, orange, cherry, and lemon candies. This lineup remained the same until 2003, when 3 of the flavors were replaced with watermelon, raspberry, and blackberry. However, the orange flavor was soon introduced to replace blackberry.
During World War 2, other candy makers donated their sugar rations to keep Life Savers in production so that they could be sent overseas with service members. 23 million boxes of Life Savers were packed into soldiers’ ration kits.
Learn more here.