Do Elephants Jump? (18 page)

In our first book,
Imponderables,
we pondered who in an elevator was responsible for determining the weight of fellow passengers. Just as elevators have posted weight limits, so do public rooms have signs indicating the maximum occupancy permitted by law. Somehow, the numbers have always seemed capricious. Why are nightclubs packed to the gills, while our book signings look like ghost towns? (We’re assuming that throngs of folks are kept at bay at the bookstore door to avoid overcrowding and overzealous fans.)

At the most basic level, the determination of occupancy load is cut and dried. As architect Norman Cox, of New York’s Franke, Gottsegen, Cox Architects told us:

Maura Gatensby, a Vancouver, Canada, architect, shared some of the occupant loads for her area (numbers have been converted from square meters to square feet and rounded off to the nearest hundredth of a square foot):

The square footage allocated per person partly determines everything from the required numbers of exits and resources for handicapped persons to the number of washroom fixtures in the lavatories. Depending upon the locality, the police or fire department might enforce these rules.

There is no single standard for building codes — states might use BOCA (Building Officials and Code Administrators), UBC (Universal Building Code), or SBC (Standard Building Code). Big cities tend to have their own codes, and might use one of these three codes as a model and modify it.

Fire departments can exert pressure on buildings, too. In some localities, if a fire department finds that the sprinkler system in a building isn’t adequate, or that the stairways are not wide enough to handle emergency situations, the occupancy load of a building can be reduced from the norm.

The insurance industry is breathing down the neck of contractors and facility owners, as well. Even if the city building officials and fire departments sign off on an occupancy load, an insurance company might not be willing to underwrite insurance unless stricter guidelines are enforced. In many businesses, more bodies in a room mean more moolah, so the push and pull of commerce with safety and insurance is a never-ending battle.

Considering that the toy business is full of sugarcoated images for children, and the happy face is the default countenance for dolls and most stuffed animals, we’ve often wondered why teddy bears are downright dour. So we contacted teddy bear artists, designers and manufacturers, hardcore collectors, and folks who write about teddy bears for a living to illuminate exactly what is bumming out stuffed bears.

Strangely, the first teddy bears were made in Germany and the United States in the same year — 1902. Mindy Kinsey, editor of
Teddy Bear and Friends
magazine, picks up the story. At the beginning, at least, teddy bears were designed to appear realistic:

When we called the big teddy bear makers, such as Gund, Steiff, and Russ Berrie, the designers couldn’t articulate why the expression of most of their bears was sad. Some suggested that they weren’t
trying
to make their bears frown at all. But go to the Web site of these companies, or visit your local toy store, and we think you’ll agree that compared to most other stuffed animals and toys, the classic bears could use a dose or two of Prozac.

But not just designers denied the “frown” premise. Kinsey’s response was typical:

Jo Rothery, editor of the English magazine
Teddy Bear Times,
thinks variety is the spice of teddy bear life:

Rothery adds that it is just like when one dog in a litter stirs your heart, even though “they all look alike.”

We were shocked when three Gund designers couldn’t articulate why they drew bears’ expressions the way they did, but one creator, Linda McCall, of Key West, Florida, describes it as an almost mystical process:

McCall, and several other sources, think the tradition of the “frowning bear” stems from an attempt to mimic how a real bear’s mouth looks. After all, bears in the wild aren’t known for their grins. The “realistic” theory, perhaps the favored one among our sources, contends that most bears aren’t frowning, but merely exhibiting a neutral emotion.

If you look carefully at the faces of teddy bears, you’ll see that the mouths of many are shaped like an upside-down capital Y. Teddy bear artist Cherri Creamer, of Alive Again Bears, says that the inverted Y is used to align the face so that the nose and eyes conform to the mouth. Whatever reason, the inverted Y provides a downward cast to bears’ mouths. So this “convenient” method of aligning the bear might be responsible for what we interpret as a frown.

We’re partial to a psychological theory to explain the “frown” of the teddy bear. Jo Rothery comments that the inverted Y

If the emotions of a teddy bear are opaque, a child can pour his emotions into his plush toy, and the bear becomes an instant empathizer. Marc Weinberg and Victoria Fraser, creators of Ballsy Bear and Bitchy Bear, agree and comment:

If bears reflect the feelings of their owners, then Ballsy Bear’s customers are not a happy bunch. Their two bears, Ballsy and Bitchy, are none too happy campers, and their classic inverted-Y mouths reveal not just a frown but a scowl. Created by a husband-wife team who both were victims of Internet startup failures, Ballsy and Bitchy are not cuddly and are happy to let you know:

Who needs another teddy bear that says, “I wuv you.” Give your friends, family, and loved ones the gift that says what you really mean: Ballsy Bear and Bitchy Bear — the World’s Nastiest Talking Teddy Bears!

Do you call Coca-Cola “soda” or “pop”? Do you call those overstuffed sandwiches “hoagies” or “submarines” or “torpedoes” or “grinders”? The answer depends upon where you’re from. Although we’ve received this “sprinkles” versus “jimmies” Imponderable before, we weren’t too excited about researching another question about regional differences in food names until we received this e-mail from reader Netanel Ganin:

We had never considered “jimmy” to have racist connotations, so we decided to do some research. Dictionaries weren’t of any help. The
American Heritage Dictionary
’s definition was typical: “Small particles of chocolate or flavored candy sprinkled on ice cream as a topping. Etymology: origin unknown.”

But quickly we could pinpoint the epicenter of jimmydom to the Mid-Atlantic and lower northeast United States. While ice cream parlors in San Francisco or Atlanta offer “sprinkles,” in Boston or Providence, you are likely to be proffered “jimmies.” You can buy jars of the cylindrical candy today, but most manufacturers hedge their bets, describing the product as “sprinkles/jimmies.” Clearly, the terms are used interchangeably, although in some localities, “sprinkles” is used to describe all flavors but chocolate, and “jimmies” for chocolate sprinkles.

There might be confusion about what to call the darn things, but we can trace their history to one man — Samuel Born. A Russian immigrant, Born settled in San Francisco and within a few years made his first contribution to culinary culture — the Born Sucker Machine, which mechanically inserted sticks into hard candies — lollipops entered the twentieth century.

In 1917, Born opened a candy store in Brooklyn, New York. He trumpeted the freshness of his confections by using the slogan “just born.” Along the way, Born invented the chocolate coating for ice cream (the kind used to enrobe soft ice cream at Dairy Queen, Carvel, Foster’s Freeze, etc.). But for our purposes, the key invention of Sam Born was the chocolate jimmy.

Nearly a century later, the grandchild of Sam Born and his cousin are co-presidents of the company, now called Just Born. Janet Ward, of Just Born, proudly proclaims:

According to some sources, that employee was Jimmy Bartholomew, who went to work at Just Born in 1930 and labored at the machine that produced the chocolate pellets that have blanketed many an ice cream and doughnut ever since, but the current co-president of the company, Ross Born, can’t positively confirm “Jimmy’s” last name. Back then, most ice cream parlors offered jimmies for free, so they proved most popular with customers who wanted an extra sugar rush without springing for the cost of a sundae.

Just Born has gone on to sell many well-known products, including Marshmallow Peeps, Mike and Ike, Hot Tamales, and Golden-berg’s Peanut Chews. But sadly, Ross Born told us: “We stopped producing jimmies in the late 1960s; it wasn’t one of our leading items.”

The jimmies produced by Just Born were always brown, but not necessarily chocolate — perhaps “chocolate-looking” would be more accurate. We’ve noticed that most of the jimmies we’ve tasted have a waxy, gummy consistency and an off-taste that doesn’t resemble chocolate. Ross Born reveals a little-known secret about jimmies — they were probably never made from real chocolate:

Assuming that jimmies were named after Mr. Bartholomew, we can assume he was of Irish descent. So then why is there a fear that “jimmy” is a slur against African Americans? Some etymologists speculate that “jimmy” is a variant of Jim Crow, the title character in a famous minstrel song performed by black performers (and white performers in blackface) in the 1830s. The song became so popular that anything that pertained to African Americans was dubbed “Jim Crow,” especially in racist contexts. Later, “Jim Crow” came to refer to segregation of blacks from whites, including the infamous Jim Crow Laws, which were enacted in the South to preserve segregation after the Civil War.

But this theory seems lame to us. Although “jimmy” has many slang connotations in American English, from a crowbar to an engine made by General Motors, none of them refer specifically to blacks. We subscribe to a much simpler explanation. In most, although admittedly not all, places where sprinkles are called “jimmies,” the reference is only to chocolate candies. Since their color resembles the complexion of many African Americans, it’s easy to see how jimmies might have picked up the racist connotations, even if the inventor of jimmies intended only to honor his Irish American employee.