So, way back when I was in the second grade, they started these commercials on TV during Saturday morning cartoons when kids all over America ruled the TV dial, as you might recall. And this quip came up: “Four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum” as if most dentists said it was OK to chew sugarless gum. But of course parents didn’t watch TV on Saturday mornings in those days so the quip never came under the scrutiny of a grownup and whenever they dragged us to a store we would instruct them to buy us sugarless gum and they would obey and so on I chewed, salivated and satiated, in the sublime oblivion that only a devotee of Beanie & Cecil and Johnny Quest could possibly enjoy.

Till sixth grade.

See one day in 5th grade I’d heard the old saw that Columbus discovered America. Up my obnoxious hand went with Whaddaya mean “Columbus discovered America” weren’t there people here already didn’t they discover it? After a brief and unsatisfying discussion I let the matter drop since Mrs. Hague wore miniskirts after all and on top of that we did have Columbus Day off from school, which made it a day when we could chew sugarless gum to our hearts’ content all day or all afternoon at any rate if our particular parents didn’t allow gum-chewing in the morning: Such quaint notions were prevalent among parents in the ’sixties.

You may ask Why did nobody else’s hand go up with the same question? I’ve been asking myself this question since the fifth grade. I wonder if such a behavioral idiosyncrasy could be genetic. My mom was the quiet and possibly-pensive one in her family; my Aunt Maria was the argumentative or rather rambunctious older sister, rambunctious being a less combative euphemism for argumentative. But the Rambunctious Gene might have simply been recessive and therefore dormant in my mom, activated to dominancy when she conceived me with my dad who after all was Class Clown in his college yearbook. So maybe I was doomed with a hand that just couldn’t stop itself from shooting upward, possibly-pensive but decidedly un-shy, even when confronted with the most benign and obvious of truths, in a classroom or elsewhere.

But perhaps it was during my 4th grade year that I was forever morphed into a freak fraught with this hand-up-what-the-fuhh personality—by Dr. Rasmussen, a colleague of my dads who drove me home one Saturday from Clark University where my father taught and where my brother and I would pass many a weekend hour staining really-black blackboards with colored chalk and exploring the curious interchangeability of Courier and Orator elements in IBM Selectric® typewriters.

Dr. Rasmussen drove a VW beetle like my grandfather in Florida and sported a suit and tie even on a Saturday, so he wreaked of both likability and respectability at the same time. Plus, he spoke English with a vague international accent, which made him cool as Mission: Impossible, my favorite TV series ever, on which I had just gotten hooked. Anyway, Dr. Rasmussen quite gently pointed out, or asked, rather, if, by waging The Civil War, wasn’t Abraham Lincoln responsible for the deaths of millions?

Now this was an interesting and novel if not revolutionary way of looking at things, and it took some doing to recall that I was not in a classroom but in the passenger seat of a VW beetle and to keep my hand from shooting up to the hood, or smashing through it, just so that I could ask a question of my own or three. But Dr. Rasmussen had spoken only in what I later learned was called the Interrogative Mood; he made no statement and offered no new information. Which gave him a perplexing advantage: What was there to dispute? Years later I would understand this as something called the Socratic Method and figure Dr. Rasmussen to be a good or even great teacher, but at the moment I was flabbergasted into silence—dumbfounded or nonplussed, I guess you could say, although this was probably the appropriate response of any fourth-grade patriot or perhaps of anyone introduced to the Socratic Method just when it was least expected while riding in the passenger seat of a VW beetle not even on a school day.

At any rate, by the sixth grade, I was primed. That was the year when my Home Town was thinking of fluoridating the public water supply, if a town can even be thought of as thinking, that is. Miss Dodd was our science teacher and she asked us what we thought and what we thought our dentists would think. Well, all of a sudden, I thought of what I had been hearing on Saturday mornings for the past four years and up my incorrigible hand shot, albeit four years late, with But what did the fifth dentist say? Strangely enough she was not nonplussed by this but smiled and nodded, seemingly plussed, which seemed at the time cooler even than Dr. Rasmussen. What’s more, she would be seeing her dentist on Friday, she said, and told us she’d ask him if he knew anything about the matter and tell us his answer on Monday.

And on Monday she did. See, the survey that the gum company took was taken via the Journal of the American Dental Association, and her dentist remembered it. He said that all dentists, five out of five, responded Do not chew gum at all. Ms. Dodd and I figured that it had to be bad for your jaw or ruin your embouchure, a word I had heard since I had just started playing the clarinet but did not know how to spell till years later when I learned French. Only when pressed, four out of five said something like Of course if you’re going to ignore my advice and chew gum anyway you might as well chew sugarless gum, so you don’t rot your teeth as well as ruin your embouchure. The fifth refused even to make this concession! This was in the age when such surveys had to be taken by phone or mail and respondents could say or write whatever they wanted even if pollsters tried to limit you to a multiple-choice option like on the Iowa Test®, to which I had been exposed every year since the 3rd grade and which seemed such a thwarter of dignified thought that it just might require a chapter all its own.

So, all of a sudden I realized that we had been handed a quip that was actually Krappe starting right before the Age of Reason, i.e., seven, when such diverse devotions as the Red Sox, Comfort Food, and Religion grab hold of an impressionable youth and hold him in their thrall forever.

The sugarless gum company, by the way, brought a halt to this 4-out-of-5 campaign, but not till decades later. For even notwithstanding Miss Dodd’s investigative reporting, some questions, intrinsic to the quip, lingered: Were more than 5 dentists ever even surveyed? If so, was it a random sample done by an objective third party of a size large enough for there to be a margin-of-error of less than plus or minus 3 percent? And where’d they get these dentists anyway where one out of five seemed to recommend the gum with sugar after all?!

But the damage was done. Even though every one of my dentists over the years has concurred, do not chew gum it’s bad for you, I chew sugarless gum to this day. Yes, I partake of Krappe. I love homemade macaroni and cheese, cholesterol notwithstanding. And I root for the Red Sox, which is also at times injurious to one’s well-being when one lives in New York City. Which I do. Grab us at an early enough age though and we are yours forever.

As for Religion, well, it might need a chapter all its own. Or three.

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