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In This Issue

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Suspect Behavior

Jailhouse Rock If your band’s going to play at a Kentucky prison, definitely learn some Skynyrd

Nolensville Notario Gets Nixed State regulators shut down one of Nashville’s most unscrupulous immigrant businesses

Misty Memories Word tripping, dog poisoning and pissing away money in Election ’07

A Star Is Bourne (Again) Amnesiac-spy trilogy culminates in a thrilling Ultimatum

The Truth About Being a Stay-at-Home Mom

Secrets! And Lies! Vampires, mad moms and silent movie mania collide in Guy Maddin’s latest fever dream

Public Art

 

 

By This Author

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South of Decent, Tennessee Acclaimed Nashville performance poet Minton Sparks’ first book is not quite what it seems

Back to the World of Fruit and Light A local poet’s first book is a marvel of remembrance and revelation

Way Beyond Stoned Why were a couple of gay Republican potheads blown away by the FBI?

Against the Hollow Thought of Nothing Local poet leans hard into life, despite the threat of darkness

Headlong Into the Flames In a new collection, poet Stephen Dunn insists on beauty

 

 

The Author

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Pablo Tanguay

 

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David Magee, a columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press and self-described MoonPie freak, is so smitten with the iconic treat that he wrote a biography of it: MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack (University Press of Florida, 182 pp., $14.95). Magee chronicles the snack’s birth in 1917 and steady rise to fame in the South and then to parts beyond, including every state in the union, and even Japan.

The MoonPie began life (so legend has it; there is no surviving documentation) when a sales manager at the Chattanooga Bakery, Earl Mitchell, noticed employees dipping graham crackers into freshly made vats of marshmallow, and then setting them on a windowsill to dry. Mitchell, who was at the time trying to come up with a snack hearty enough to sell to coal miners in Kentucky, had an epiphany: a marshmallow sandwich, round and big as the moon, topped with a layer of chocolate.

So successful was the new snack—priced at only a nickel—that the Chattanooga Bakery eventually stopped making everything but the MoonPie, and 90 years later, the family-run enterprise on the banks of the Tennessee River is still making nothing but MoonPies—1 million a day.

Magee’s book documents how the MoonPie’s expansion north was initially a result of the great African American migration out of the South to northern industrial cities. Workers could leave family and friends, but not their MoonPies. The book also details the internal dynamics that have kept the Chattanooga Bakery in the same family for three generations and includes a surprisingly interesting account of the bakery’s struggle in the 1960s to refit its production line to accommodate the Double-Decker MoonPie and the equally difficult task, two decades later, to refit it again for the Mini-MoonPie.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the MoonPie’s legacy is that, unlike other iconic American brands like Coca-Cola and Ritz Crackers, the MoonPie has never been nationally advertised, and rarely advertised at all. How is it that the MoonPie is still able to flourish? Magee argues that, among other things, the MoonPie “has the power to stir in us our most poignant memories.” Which can hardly be said of the Whoopie Pie.