CHICAGO. As a security guard tightens the lock around the chain-link gates of Snyder’s Novelties here on the city’s South Side, a grown man standing nearby begins to weep. “It was the best job I ever had,” says Willie Newbill, who moved to the Windy City from Mississippi in 1969, when he was eighteen. “It was steady work, and a lot of fun, too.”
Fake vomit
Snyder’s was, until yesterday, the last fake vomit manufacturer still operating in America. In its heyday, the plant employed 400 men and women and churned out over 120,000 pools of fake vomit a year, along with numerous piles of fake dog crap and, until the advent of the ball-point pen, fake puddles of ink. “Snyder’s kept America laughing through two World Wars, Vietnam and the Summer of Love,” says novelty historian Sheldon Morkrantz of the University of Illinois-Chicago. “It’s tough to maintain a proper academic distance about something that meant so much to so many people,” he says, visibly emotional.
Fake vomit has been a staple of American smart-alecks and wise guys since the 1940’s, when a secret latex and colored foam recipe concocted by Snyder’s gained immediate acceptance in world prank markets. “It had a soft but sturdy texture,” says Pierre Trufault, a specialist on American gross-out culture at the Institute Pour les Studies Americain in Lyons, France. “The chunks of fake food were multi-hued and multi-textured. It was, in its own way, a work of art.”
Pritzker: “Someday you’re gonna want fake barf and you’ll have to go to China to get it!”
The closing of Snyder’s will mean that approximately 60 manufacturing and 15 office and shipping department employees will be out of work, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker blamed the loss on the Trump administration’s neglect of the novelty industry. “Trump had the chance to renew the Fake Vomit and Dog Poop Protection Act of 1994, but like Pontius Pilate, he just washed his hands of the whole mess,” Pritzker said. “We need a president who will fight hard for the right of working people to make artificial human wastes at good wages!”
Clinton: Proposed a student council motion to ban fake vomit.
While the Biden administration has expressed support for the fake vomit industry, the party must deal with the legacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who opposed its use for practical jokes as student council president in Park Ridge, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago.
“My views have evolved,” she told reporters at her home as she mulls a third run for President in 2024. “Had I known fake vomit would come back to haunt me sixty years later I wouldn’t have told on the boys who grossed me out with it.”