Bubble Beeper

Amurol Products of Naperville, Illinois, Wrigley's novelty-gum maker, introduced the Bubble Beeper in June 1992: a colorful plastic clip-on toy pager with 17 sticks of gum inside. It hit Baltimore, Philadelphia and Chicago first, and a company spokesman said it had sold millions within a few months. The joke was timing. Beepers had become a teenage fashion accessory — some kids wore fake ones just to look the part, a Pennsylvania newspaper reported that year — and a candy one let any kid clip on the look.

That was also the problem. In 1992 real pagers carried a darker association, as equipment for street-level drug dealing, and school systems including Baltimore's had banned beepers on school property. Some parents were outraged by a candy version aimed at kids; a DEA agent quoted in the Philadelphia Daily News worried about what might happen if a child wore one through someone's turf, and protests led some larger chains, 7-Eleven among them, to take them off the shelves. Amurol's marketing vice president, Gary Schuetz, pushed back: "99 percent of the people who use beepers are positive role models — doctors and lawyers, salesmen and even journalists." Sealed ones still turn up with collectors.