Portrait of a Gum Man

People often tell me, "Nathan, with your staunch and sometimes frightening advocacy of all things gum-related, your globe trotting Giant Baby-chasing, your loving dedication to the mental and spiritual well-being of your customers, and all of your other eclectic and seemingly non-related activities, you are one peculiar dude! You're either the greatest Renaissance Man of our time, or you're nuttier than a bag of squirrels. Don't get me wrong. We, the members of your growing gum-chewing family, are behind you all the way. Still, you are a puzzle wrapped in an enigma double-dipped in a knock-knock joke strapped to the back of a chicken crossing the road. And try as I might, I just can't figure out what makes you tick." I'm paraphrasing, of course.

Don't expect any easy answers here, my friends. All I can say is that if you do ever figure me out, be sure to drop me a line. Still, for the benefit of those singularly motivated individuals who are chronicling this, the Golden Age of Gum, I offer my life story. I am just a humble gum man. My privacy is important to me. But my hope is that, by breaking my silence, future historians and gum researchers may be able to find wisdom and courage to guide them through whatever challenges they may face in the gum-chewing world of tomorrow - challenges that we can't even imagine today.

-Nathan

Here's me with some of my old Adventure Team buddies on a Giant Baby "fact finding" mission in Tahiti. That's me in the center with Joe (left) and Joe (right). We had a lot of good times, me and these guys. Good times... good times.

Humble Beginnings

I was born on April 23rd, 1966 in sleepy Carmichael, California. Aside from my birth, and the birth of my friend Kevin Murphy, it was an otherwise uneventful day. Or so people foolishly believed at the time. April 23rd is the day Shakespeare was born. Interestingly it was also the day he died. Yet despite his brief life, he wrote a lot of plays and stuff. Anyhow, this makes me a Taurus. I don't believe in Astrology, however. In fact, no Taurus believes in Astrology. Not a one. Imagine, a whole twelfth of the population that doesn't believe in Astrology. It's spooky when you think about it.

Education

I attended the prestigious Kenneth Avenue School until sixth grade. It was here that I first recognized my love of gum. Gum was banned in the classroom, for no good reason that I could see. My guess is that it was just another case of "the man" coming down hard on gum-chewers. I don't even think the teachers knew why gum was banned. It had just always been that way. Too often we don't question our fundamental assumptions about gum and gum-related activity. Adults need to understand that denying a child his or her God-given access to gum only makes gum that much more attractive. Fortunately, it was the early seventies, so several of the teachers were hippies. This meant that the occasional teacher would allow gum on a limited-use basis. But these few enlightened educators were definitely the minority. I'm encouraged at how far we've come since those days. But we still have a long way to go. Starr King Junior High School was not much better in the area of rules and regulations hostile to gum chewers. But we had a big playground, so me and some other kids would often go off behind the backstop and "sneak a chew". Like many people, I have blocked out most of my memories of junior high school. Pop psychologists would say it's because the memories are too traumatic, which sounds about right. No loss.

El Camino Fundamental High School was, at the time, a bold experiment in adding the word "Fundamental" to the name of your school to avoid getting closed down by the district. It was what we would today call a "magnet school", which really only meant we took more tests than kids at other schools. We were turning into young adults, which meant, finally, we saw some relaxation of these draconian and brainless anti-gum policies. School officials recognized that yes, kids do chew gum, and there was nothing they could do about it except to make brochures about safe gum-chewing available at the nurse's office. In 1984 I went to University of California at Santa Cruz, which at the time was known as a "gum-tolerant school" (less so these days). I'll admit that I experimented with all kinds of gum, and I don't regret a moment of it. Here I was exposed to the great philosophical questions, such as did the existence of gum precede its essence, or visa versa? I got my degree in Sociology, and received honors in the major for my thesis entitled "Controlling the Means of Gum Production: A Leninist Perspective." What can I say? It was a commie school. I knew if I threw the obligatory Marxism in there they'd cut me the slack to pursue my studies of gum in peace.

Working for the Man

Since there were no graduate schools offering course work in gum, and since I knew I'd need the money to fund my dream of a shining House of Gum that would be an example to all mankind, I entered the workforce. I started out at UCSC's Literature Board. I think I was an advisor for Lit grad students, but, again, most of my memories of this time have been repressed. I did once wake up screaming from a dream where I was swimming around in a small pond full of big fish that were devouring each other while the Governor was siphoning the water out to build more "prison ponds". I'm not sure what it meant, except that in this dream I was trying desperately to keep the student fish from floating belly-up. Man, what a nightmare. Anyway, from there I went to work for an OCR company which was founded by a bunch of professors from the Peoples' Republic of China. The Red Chinese have taken a lot of bad press lately, perhaps deservedly so. But their attitudes about gum are very enlightened. Understand that this is a culture that was chewing gum three thousand years before the invention of flavor crystals! Amazing. There's a lot we could learn from them if only our two cultures could come together in gum-chewing brotherhood and peace. I believe I was hired on the strength of my senior thesis.

From there I went over to work at Radius. Radius makes a lot of cool gadgetry for the Macintosh, a computer many gum-chewers still use to this very day. I finally had to part ways with Radius for creative differences: they didn't like my idea for the "Monitor in a Mouse". They said trying to read a display on a mouse while you're also moving it would make users seasick, and they may have had a good point. I suppose we'll never know. But there was a growing community of Radius refugees working over at UMAX Computer Corporation, and they welcomed me like a long lost..., well... lost person. UMAX is a Taiwanese company. Though they have had some petty political disagreements with mainland China, Taiwan shares the same proud gum-chewing heritage as their communist brothers to the west. Perhaps some day the people of Taiwan and the Red Chinese and all of the other people of the world, will set aside their differences and embrace in harmony and understanding as members of this fragile and beautiful gum-chewing planet we all share. We are not so different after all.

This is my dream. I share it with you.

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