CHICAGO. As a security guard tightens the lock around the chain-link gates of Snyder’s Novelties here on the city’s South Side, a grown man standing nearby begins to weep. “It was the best job I ever had,” says Willie Newbill, who moved to the Windy City from Mississippi in 1969, when he was eighteen. “It was steady work, and a lot of fun, too.”
Fake vomit
Snyder’s was, until today, the last fake vomit manufacturer still operating in America. In its heyday, the plant employed 400 men and women and churned out over 120,000 pools of fake vomit a year, along with numerous piles of fake dog feces and, until the advent of the ball-point pen, fake puddles of ink. “Snyder’s kept America laughing through two World Wars, Vietnam and the Summer of Love,” says novelty historian Sheldon Morkrantz of the University of Illinois-Chicago. “It’s tough to maintain a proper academic distance about something that meant so much to so many people,” he says, visibly emotional.
Item #259 in Snyder’s final catalog
Fake vomit has been a staple of American smart-alecks and wise guys since the 1940’s, when a secret latex and colored foam recipe was concocted by Snyder’s, and gained immediate acceptance in world prank markets. “It had a soft but sturdy texture,” says Pierre Trufault, a specialist on American gross-out culture at the Institute pour les Studies Americain in Lyons, France. “The chunks of fake food were multi-hued and multi-textured. In its own way, it was a work of art.”
Edwards: “Someday you’re gonna want some fake barf and you’ll have to go to China to get it!”
The closing of Snyder’s will mean that approximately 60 manufacturing and 15 office and shipping department employees will be out of work, and Democratic presidential candidates were quick to blame the Bush administration for its failure to protect the novelty industry. “George Bush had the chance to renew the Fake Vomit and Dog Poop Protection Act of 1994, but like Pontius Pilate, he just washed his hands of the whole deal,” said former U.S. Senator and trial lawyer John Edwards. “If I’m elected your President I will fight for the right of working people to make artificial human wastes at good wages!”
Clinton: Proposed a student council motion to ban fake vomit.
Current Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady and current U.S. Senator from New York, found herself in the position of playing catch-up when opposition research produced a high school newspaper article indicating that she had opposed fake vomit as student council president in Park Ridge, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago.
Park Ridge East High School Gross-Out Club
“I have grown and evolved over time, and my view of fake vomit has changed accordingly,” she told reporters as she boarded a plane bound for South Carolina, site of one of the “Super Duper Tuesday” primaries scheduled for February 5th. “Had I known that it would come back to haunt me sixty years later I would have taken a more nuanced position on the fake vomit-fake dog poop question.”
Copyright 2008, Con Chapman
