In that list of well-known Twin City residents — State Farm founder G.J. Mecherle, actor McLean Stevenson, Pulitzer Prize winner David Broder, Hollywood icons like Laurie Metcalf and John Malkovich — Schulz surely deserves to be there, too.
He's the inventor of Laffy Taffy.
“I do feel a sense of ownership … and pride,” says Schulz, about to turn 81, some 37 years now after his concoction was created in a lab at Bloomington’s Beich’s Candies.
You know Laffy Taffy, of course.
Anywhere in the world, it is that ageless piece of a childhood, once a chunky square but now a rectangular, individually-wrapped piece of fruit-flavored taffy, with a joke inside each wrapper:
"What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef."
“What is an owl's favorite subject in school? Owlgebra."
"What tastes better than it smells? A tongue."
Mind you, Schulz takes no credit for the jokes. That was a “very smart woman” in marketing.
But the rest of the story of the taffy is not that laffy or daffy and, if not for Schulz, it wouldn’t be a story at all.
At Beich’s, a longtime B-N candy factory eventually bought up by Nestle and then this month, Ferrero, it was back in the late ’70s that the piece of equipment that made saltwater taffy (called taffy caramels) was becoming outdated. That's when Bill Beich, company president, mulled getting rid of taffy caramels and the outdated equipment, too.
Schulz wasn’t so quick on the idea.
Instead, in the next year, he updated the machinery. As a kid and a fan of Smith Brothers cherry cough drops, he also came up with a new taffy formula, this time as a cherry "sour."
In candy land, that isn’t easy.
A cherry flavor was indeed found but only, says Schulz, after contacting 42 flavor companies.
A sour taste then was introduced (it's malic acid, that pleasantly sour taste in fruits, that gets put into candies, you learn from Schulz).
And so was born the Laffy Taffy formula.
Still to be investigated: Would kids like it?
Enter now Normal’s Epiphany Catholic School, an unwitting site that is part of world candy history, too.
That's where Schulz took his new-fangled Laffy Taffy. It's where it was tasted and tested with the help of 100 tongues in grades 3 through 6. (An even lesser known piece of world triviata — one of the "testing" grade-schoolers at Epiphany at the time was John Carter. Today he owns Jack Lewis Jewelry in Bloomington.)
The results of the Epiphany “testing”?
An epiphany! “Outstanding!” gleams Schulz.
So, starting in 1981, after adding more fruit flavors, Laffy Taffy went out to world markets.
As always with candy, everything is predicated on whether kids like it.
In a fifth-grade class at Epiphany, as Schulz likes to tell it, there was one student who said he didn't like the watermelon-flavored Laffy Taffy because, unlike real watermelon, it didn’t make him burp.
Kids, he explained to Schulz, like to recite the alphabet while burping, to see how far into the alphabet they can go before "ending the burp."
So Schulz went back into Beich labs and reformulated the watermelon-flavored piece of Laffy Taffy, adding oil of cucumber (cucumbers, as you might have noticed, can make one burp).
“Usually we do not retest the same class,” says Schulz. “But we wanted to find out if the new formula would make this one boy burp. Upon testing, his face lit up and then suddenly he began to burp and recite the alphabet. His voice got squeaky high as he stretched to an end and by now all the kids were laughing ...”
And the rest, as they don't say, is belch history.
Since Schulz’s “invention,” and then his own retirement in 2001, Laffy Taffy has gone on to become legendary worldwide and synonymous for its soft, flexible nature.
In 2006 in fact, Laffy Taffy even inspired a hip-hop song that rocketed to No. 1 in America — a tune by the rapper D4L that encourages those of the female persuasion to "shake dat Laffy Taffy."
It is a referral that does not particularly pertain to candy — at least not of the Beich’s kind, or what they put on your pillow at Chicago’s Hotel Monaco.
Bill Schulz? He only shakes his head at that, washed then with a smile.
And he thought just trying to burp the watermelon alphabet was rather novel.
Move over, Willy Wonka!