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The Tootsie Roll is 126 Years Old Today
Written by Jimmy
The Tootsie Roll was invented on Feburary 22 in 1896, by Leo Hirschfeld. A cool little story from our friends at Wikipedia:
During the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in 1950, Mortar (weapon) sections under the US Marine Corps started to run out of mortar rounds. The radio men of these sections started requesting more rounds. There were too many nearby enemy anti air emplacements however, and the risk that they might lose any airlifted supplies was too great, so they had to wait. After two days of waiting, all the mortar sections ran out of rounds. At this point the risk was taken and supplies were dropped anyway. When the troops found the crates of mortar rounds, they found the crates were instead filled with tootsie rolls. The cause of this error was that a supply specialist did not know that the codename for mortar rounds was “Tootsie Rolls”, and instead ordered hundreds of crates of tootsie roll candies instead of mortar rounds.
Here’s the Tootsie Roll Jingle:
Now I think we can agree that the guy who dumped Tootsie Rolls on amunition starved troops was pretty dumb. Can we also agree this lady is a wee bit dumber:
Jimmy