The Baby Ruth Candy Bar stands as one of the great American icons, and one with a sweetly controversial history. The chocolate-covered peanut, caramel and nougat-loaded confectionary delight was concocted by a Chicago-born baker named Otto Young Schnering in 1920, and brought to the candy counters a year later. Despite its rather obvious connection to one of the greatest home-run hitting champions of baseball, namely Babe Ruth, Schnering repeatedly insisted that his candy bar was named in honor of someone of quite a different claim to fame, and by the name of Ruth Cleveland. She was born in October of 1891, by chance the same month as Otto himself, and known to her adoring parents as ‘Baby Ruth’. She quickly became an icon in her own right by the end of the century, and a ‘darling of the press’ by virtue of her being the daughter of a United States President named Grover Cleveland. But by the beginning of the new century she had dropped from public view, having died of diphtheria at age 12, in January of 1904. The very popular candy bars, costing just 5 cents, were being produced at the rate of 5,000,000 bars per day in 1926, by the Curtiss Candy Company created by Otto, and which became the largest candy-making enterprise in the world. The equally popular Butterfinger Bar came out in 1923, and both favorites became the primary product of the company for over 70 years. The company was purchased by Nabisco in 1981, and by 1990, became the property of the giant Nestlé.
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