Word: gum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wrong: The gum was always disgusting. This was not normal gum. It was hard, brittle, implausibly pink and covered with a puzzling flour-like substance. All in all, not a particularly pleasing gustatory sensation...
...really offer a cogent explanation for this gender gap. But this sociological imbalance was duly noted by my friends and me, and we played the gum card (pardon the pun) for all it was worth, finding it a relatively effortless method of currying favor with the females...
...with the demise of baseball card gum, it's a whole new ballgame. (And now I can't find a date.) Gum used to be the raison d'être for the cards: Topps itself started as a gum purveyor, founded in 1938 as the Topps Chewing Gum Company. But the peculiarly petrified gum that Topps churned out probably didn't do wonders for profits...
...Topps decided to shake things up a bit and supplement the gum with--you guessed it--pictures of baseball players on 2" by 3" cards. This wasn't a new idea--cigarette manufacturers included cards with their smokes in the 1900s--but Topps slugged a homer with its new combination...
While cigarettes were unwholesome and associated with decrepitude, what could be more American--short of Mom and apple pie--than baseball and chewing gum? Sales took off. Topps swiftly began to focus less on gum and more on cards--delighting legions of card collectors (and probably gum chewers as well...