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Reprinted from The Sunday Times, Scranton, Pennsylvania
Jill Flynn was interviewed by Kristin Wintermantel Durkin of The Sunday Times.
Wayne County Woman Sweet on M&Ms
The 13 wooden steps down into Jill Flynn’s basement lead to a rainbow-colored candy land. The first splash of color slams on your eyeballs at the landing: the wall there is lined with scores of little NASCAR racers, emblazoned with M&M candies and the number 36. Turn the corner and a sea of primary colors – bright red, yellow, and blue, along with green and orange – hits you in the face. There are M&Ms everywhere. VERSATILE Versions of the rotund chocolates are transformed into household products, decorations and memorabilia. One wall of shelves holds candy dispensers (shaped like the M&M characters) still in their original packaging. A white wicker baby’s bassinet holds plush M&M toys, their little white arms and legs giving them a Humpty Dumpty appearance. On the windowsill are four M&M lighted pumpkins, carved of resin. Across the room, on another shelf, are a series of Easter baskets, still wrapped in cellophane, each with an M&M plush toy and oodles of candies. A pool table holds the brand’s 2002 Halloween merchandise. Mrs. Flynn calls the plastic figurines and photo holders by their color names. “Orange” is dressed like a pirate, “Yellow” is wrapped like a mummy, and “Red” is garbed like a vampire. “Green” (the only female character) is a witch. “When you look at ‘em, you just have to smile,” she said. HAPPY HOLIDAYS Another corner of the 20-by-24 foot room is the Christmas section, with decorative M&M tins, ornaments, tree lights, tree skirt, and plant holders. You can barely see the wood paneled walls, for this is Mrs. Flynn’s M&M room, the site of her shrine to the 61-year-old milk chocolaty candies. Halloween is Thursday, and you can bet the only sweets available at the Flynn home will be black and orange M&Ms. That’s all she ever gives out to trick-or-treaters, and the kids in this Cherry Ridge Township neighborhood outside Honesdale have come to expect it. She’s a member of the M&M Collectors Club, a four-year-old group that shares its passion for all things M&M with newsletters, e-mails, phone calls, collectors guides, and of course, conventions. Mrs. Flynn never set out to collect M&M merchandise. She used to save the toy tops from the plastic tubes of M&Ms that she would buy for her sons at Christmas and Easter. The family would use them as ornaments or decorations. She also bought the cookie tins along the way. Five years ago, as she pulled out all the Christmas decorations from storage, Mrs. Flynn realized there seems to be an M&M theme going on. “Seeing all those tins was my first realization that I was a collector,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh wow, I really do have a lot of M&M things.” Though she doesn’t have any particular memory of M&Ms as a kid, she has always liked them, as have sons Scott, now 23, and Joshua, 21. “I have a picture of me handing Scott a bag of M&Ms when he was just a baby,” she said. The little chocolate buttons have definitely become her favorite candy. “Chocolate is a good thing!” she said. In 1999, she saw an article about Ginny Wolfe, an M&M collector from Lake Harmony. She wrote to Mrs. Wolfe and learned of a newly formed club. “I was really excited just to think some-body else was doing this,” she recalled. When Mrs. Flynn joined and met some of the hundreds of other members, she realized she could use her knowledge as a resource. Besides their Web site (www.mnmclub.com), one member published an unofficial guide to M&M merchandise; he also sent her a videotape of M&M commercials dating back to the 1950s. It’s pretty neat to see “Leave It to Beaver” type kids talking about how the candy “melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” Newsletters and guides also help Mrs. Flynn to add to her area of specialty – M&M advertising. She has six thick red binders full of ads from 947 to present day, and she can quote the year of each one probably as easily as a Mars company executive. Most are in English, but the others comprise a mini-United Nations of marketing. “I don’t know what they say, but you know these are the M&M guys,” Mrs. Flynn said of the characters. “They’re universal.” She enjoys tracing the evolution of the characters, from brown circles with stick legs and an “m” around their eyes like a huge mask, to the bright chubby round guys (and gal, we’re not forgetting Miss “Green”) with enough attitude to proclaim themselves the official candy of the new millennium. The Holy Grail she’s still pursuing is the original advertising and packaging from the 1940s and ‘50s. “Old 5-cent M&M boxes – I’d love to have those,” she said. But her collection counts a number of important pieces. There is a rare beige ceramic M&M cookie jar from 1982 with three different scenes featuring the “Green” and “Orange” characters, and several candy dispensers the Mars Company only distributed in Europe. Her husband, Steve, a plumber, and her sons, now in college and law school, help her in her never-ending quest. “I like the hunt,” she said, “just as much as finding the product.” Contact the writer: kdurkin@timesshamrock.com Memories That Melt in Your Mouth M&M were born in 1940 when Forrest Mars Sr. formed a candy company in Newark, N.J. They were first sold to the public in 1941 and became a favorite of American GIs in World War II. By now, these cute chocolate buttons are one of the most popular candies in the world. Here are a few things we’ll bet you didn’t know about them:
- They were originally packaged in a cardboard tube, and the little “ms” were originally brown, not white. In 1948, Mars changed the packaging to the dark brown pouch still used today.
- The two “Ms” stand for Mr. Mars and Bruce Murrie, who put up some of the capital for the project.
- The great taste doesn’t come cheap to dieters – there are 240 calories in a 1.69-ounce package of M&M and 10 grams of fat.
- The slogan “the milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand” debuted in 1954, as did M&M characters and peanut candies.
- Mars removed red from the M&M color mix in 1976 because of a national controversy over a certain type of red food coloring. Even though M&Ms didn’t use it, the company pulled the color to reassure consumers. Red returned in 1987.
- The first space shuttle astronauts asked for M&Ms to be included in the food supply for their 1981 flight. M&Ms are included in the space food exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
- In 1995, Mars conducted a vote for a new color to be added to M&Ms. Consumers chose blue. This year another vote took place, and purple was added to the mix.
- The 1990s also brought three new M&M varieties: peanut butter, almond and crispy.
- The company launched a new advertising campaign in 1996 that featured actors like Tia Carrere, Steven Weber and Patrick Warburton interacting with the chocolate characters.
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