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Every Tuesday at 7:42 a.m. and 5:18 p.m., Tom Harte shares a few thoughts on food and shares recipes. A founder of “My Daddy’s Cheesecake,” a bakery/café in Cape Girardeau, a food columnist for The Southeast Missourian, and a cookbook author, he also blends his passion for food with his passion for classical music in his daily program, The Caffe Concerto.

A Harte Appetite: That's a Cracker Jack!

flickr user Mike Mozart (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

“Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack” is undoubtedly the most famous line from the ditty, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."  To the makers of Cracker Jack the line has certainly been the most valuable.  Someone once tried to figure out the worth of the musical plug by comparing it to the cost of buying advertising on the outfield walls of every major league stadium and concluded that such a campaign would cost roughly $25 million a year.  “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” furnishes Cracker Jack the equivalent every year for free, making the song the greatest product placement scheme in the history of marketing.

The songwriters, Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer, probably had little idea how profitable their song could be when they composed it, decades before either of them would ever attend a major league game.  The idea for the ode came to Norworth as he was riding the New York subway when he spied a sign promoting a Giants game at the Polo Grounds.

Since then the song has been performed thousands of times, and that’s just by the late Harry Caray alone.

Even before Cracker Jack became inextricably linked to baseball, it hit a home run with the public when it was introduced at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago by Frederick “Fritz” Rueckheim and his brother Louis, German immigrants whose business started with a popcorn cart.  It got its name when someone tasting it for the first time used a slang expression of the day, “That’s a crackerjack,” meaning first-rate, to describe it.

Soon it was being sold in specially designed wax paper-lined boxes containing little prizes and emblazoned with an image of the founder’s grandson dressed in a sailor suit, becoming for a time the world’s biggest selling packaged confection.

The prizes aren’t what they used to be but there’s still nothing like the thought of eating more Cracker Jack to make any fan wish for extra innings.

Tom Harte is a retired faculty member from Southeast Missouri State University where he was an award-winning teacher, a nationally recognized debate coach, and chair of the department of Speech Communication and Theatre.
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