US Pop Culture - 1950s - Twinkies

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., hamster8 at h... wrote:

> 1) Did you guys have Twinkies in the 50s?

I tried a few versions of your question on Ask Jeeves, and found:
http://www.unionlabel.org/labelletter/so2000/twinkies.htm
I copied the article (without checking the copyright, Neil), but 
you must go to the site to see the photo of the cake.

It says: 
"Union members who make Hostess Twinkies snack cakes put together the 
world's largest Twinkies birthday cake this spring to mark the 70th 
birthday of the ever-popular finger food.

The cake was 25 feet high and contained 20,000 individual Twinkies. 
It was displayed and eaten during a celebration on Chicago's Navy 
Pier.

Members of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco & Grain Millers Local 
Union 1 at Interstate Baking Co. in the Chicago suburb of Schiller 
Park made the cake.

(Attention trivia buffs: Twinkies were first made and marketed in 
1930, two for a nickel. Their original banana-creme filling gave way 
to today's vanilla-creme in the face of the banana shortage during 
World War II.)"

Note from me here: There never was a murder trial in the US where the 
defendant claimed he been insane due to eating Twinkies. The 
disappointed patronage-job seeker (I forgot his name) who killed 
George Moscone and Harvey Milk argued that he had been sliding into 
'insanity' (depression, apparently) for a long time, offering as 
proof that he had been changing his lifestyle for the worose, 
including going from a health nut who worked out all the time to a 
couch potato who ate Twinkies.

> 2) What year did Arthur Miller publish The Crucible.

I used Google for this one. The very first hit was: 
http://www.ogram.org/17thc/crucible.shtml which says:
"Miller created works of art, inspired by the actual events for the 
artistic/political purposes Miller intended: first produced on 
Broadway on January 22, 1953, it was in response to the panic caused 
by irrational fear of Communism during the Cold War which ultimately 
resulted in the anti-Communist hearings by Senator Joseph McCarthy 
which started on Feb. 3, 1953"