It’s a thing of legend and mystery. It’s a Tootsie Pop.
If someone gets a wrapper with a star on it, it can be swapped for a free Tootsie Pop, right? Wrong.
Ellen Gordon, president of Tootsie Roll Industries, said the rumor that a wrapper with an American Indian aiming a bow and shooting an arrow with a star at the end of it would earn people a free Tootsie Pop has been around for nearly 70 years.
“We don’t know how it started,” Gordon said. “We’ve asked some of the older employees, and they don’t know for sure. They think it was during World War II or during the ’40s the rumor started spreading if you found the star you win a free Tootsie Pop.”
Gordon said the most plausible explanation is some individual retailers offered a free Tootsie Pop for a star wrapper as a special promotion. Somehow, the legend spread across the country.
“We get tens of thousands of letters about it, and we always send them back a little note,” Gordon said.
To keep children from feeling too disappointed, Tootsie Roll Industries created a story of an American Indian chief, named Shooting Star, who originally put the candy center inside the Tootsie Pop. According to the legend, Shooting Star comes back to personally check the suckers every now and then, placing a star on the wrappers he looks at.
The real reason the stars are on some wrappers but not others? The wrapper paper is made on a roll cut by a machine.
“Various figures are printed on each wrapper, and every third wrapper or so is repeated,” Gordon said.
Even though the company does not endorse the trade of a wrapper for a free sucker, senior Jeff Jones was able to get several free suckers as a child by saving star wrappers and redeeming them at a Kansas City area candy store.
“When I was a kid, I used to eat them all the time,” Jones said. “We’d take them in to wherever we bought them and get free ones.”
Junior Nikki Armbruster redeemed her Tootsie Pop wrappers with an American Indian and a star through her father.
“Dad gave me a quarter every single time I found one of the wrappers with a star and Indian on it,” Armbruster said. “He said he did it when he was a kid, but we couldn’t find a store who would do it for me.”
While some retailers may trade a star wrapper for a free Tootsie Pop, neither Kwik Shop nor Santa Fe Market participates.
Kwik Shop Manager Kim Dunn said she has a few people a year, mostly children, come in and try to redeem a wrapper.
“It’s definitely false,” she said.
Dunn said Tootsie Pops, first made in 1931, are not Kwik Shop’s biggest-selling product but several adults trying to stop smoking come in to buy the suckers.
The other big Tootsie Pop question, how many licks does it take to get to the center, first posed in the 1970 Mr. Owl commercial, really may never be answered.
Tootsie Roll Industries gets hundreds of letters from children who have found the answer each year, with answers ranging from 100 to 5,800 licks, with most falling in the 600 to 800 category. Everyone who submits an answer is mailed a Clean Stick Award certificate.
Purdue University and the University of Michigan have both conducted studies with machines that simulated a human tongue to find the number of licks. Purdue students decided on 364 licks, while the University of Michigan machine took 411.
Jones got to 10 before he bit. <br/>The world may never know.The world may never know.
The world may never know.