The Jumping Snakes of S.S. Adams
By Maurice Zolotow

---From the "Saturday Evening Post", June 1, 1946---

In the long and painful history of practical jokmg-which began in the paleolithic era when a cave-man humorist disguised himself in the skin of a saber-toothed tiger and scared his fellow cave men out of their wits - Sam Adams, a staid sixty-seven-year-old industrialist of Asbury Park, New Jersey, stands out like a beacon light. In this case, probably, the beacon light explodes in your face if you go anywhere near it.

Adams, a short, placid, chubby gentleman with kindly, watery blue eyes and a solemn, unsmiling expression, is the Thomas Alva Edison of practical jokesmithing. He is famous for having invented such sadistic little contrivances as Corkscrew-No. 146 in the S. S. Adams Company catalogue: "A corkscrew with a left-handed thread. Usually takes the victim several minutes to wake up." - Imitation Bedbugs - No. 264: "One of these imitation Bed-bugs placed on a pillow will scare the ladies most to death "and Squirting Cigarettes-No. 872: "A cigarette package which resembles a popular brand and contains three imitation squirting cigarettes, which may be loaded with water. The moocher gets it in the eye when he borrows one of these."

In all, Mr. Adams estimates that during his forty-year career as a jokesmith he has devised about 600 of these charming gadgets, and, of these, thirty-seven have seemed significant enough to patent.
 

The snakes leaped from a can labeled "peanut brittle." The test of the gadget is: Will she buy one to try it on others?	No prankster himself, Adams has invented approximately 600 novelties for practical hokers. His great work is a dribble glass which outdribbles and outsells all imitations.

Mr. Adams also manufactures his fiendish contraptions on a mass-production scale. His factory, with its ninety employees, grinds out more exploding cigars and squirting roses than all his eleven malicious competitors combined. lt does a gross business of $250,000 a year, which accounts for about $2,000,000 in retail sales. The jokers'-novelty trade, which has at least 4000 store outlets, does a business of $3,000,000 a year. "I sell ten times more of my items in California than in any other state," Adams says. Maine is the weakest territory for jokers' novelties. Adams has only three customers from Maine, and, judging from the paucity of orders, he thinks they must be starving to death. The rush season, of course, is February and March, when dealers are stocking up for the April Fool trade, but between Thanksgiving and New Tear's Eve, when the season of hilarity is in full swing, is also profitable.

As he gets on in years, Adams broods more and more about the excruciating phase of his business. He has nightmarish visions of little children getting bold of No. 300-Itch Powder: "The funny powder that makes them scratch "-or jokers who carry practical jokes too far by working No.14 on a weak hearted lady-Auto Bomb: "When anyone steps on starter, it shoots, whistles, discharges black smoke and shoots again."

"I guess," Adams says in a gentle voice, shaking his large round bald head, "if I had a nickel for every time I've been cussed, I'd be the richest man in the world today."

One of his consolations is that few children buy these jokers' novelties, apparently on the theory that it is cheaper simply to put a tack under Aunt Susie than to pay twenty-five cents for No.774, the Shooting Book -A large book which shoots when opened. Ten extra large percussion caps are supplied with each hook." Retailers bear out Adams' contention that the overwhelming majority of buyers are mature men past thirty. The biggest repeat business comes from salesmen and sales executives, who are wild about joke novelties. Theatrical entertainers, dentists and fraternity men are also incur-able addicts.

"The whole basic principle of a good joke novelty," Adams explains, "is that it has to be easy and simple to work. If you have to go through a lot of complications to set the stage for the gag, the public will not go for your item. The best idea is to work with an ordinary everyday object which is around the house."

The Shooting Coaster fits this definition perfectly. It is a metal coaster upon which you casually place the victim's highball. There is nothing unusual about the mise en scene. Just a nice, tinkling, amber highball on its round coaster on a coffee table. You don't ask the victim to take anything or to do anything. The victim only follows his normal course of action. He picks up his drink. As soon as he raises the glass ever so slightly, an explosive device, loaded with a paper percussion cap, goes off, scaring the pants off him and frequently causing him to drop his highball right on your Persian rug, a result which will no doubt greatly amuse the wife of any practical joker.

"Naturally," says Adams, who speaks of these matters in a detached analytical tone, never chuckling or grinning, "the reaction should always be unexpected. I mean, you have to say to yourself, speaking as an inventor, 'What is the opposite reaction I want to create from what Mr. Average Man would normally expect?' I mean, if you pick up a glass of milk or water, what is the opposite reaction you expect? Naturally, if the glass leaks, that is the opposite reaction. So I invented a glass which leaks, the famous Dribble Glass, which is probably the most pirated item I ever had. Although I got out a patent on it, the Japs and the Germans and the fly-by-nights in this country drove me crazy with their cheap imitations of it, and they undersold me by fifty per cent. But I am happy to say that no other dribble glass ever dribbled as much as the Adams Dribble Glass, which is still supreme, and sells over three hundred thousand a year."
 

The Auto Bomb - it explodes noisily and sends out smoke - gives its creator a little concern. It may be a trifle violent, Adams feels, for sensitive souls with delicate nerves.	All over the records. But she won't have to retype the page, for the realistic-looking ink blot, made of metal, is a fake.

The present, and highly improved, Dribble Glass is a six-ounce tumbler which has an ingenious design of grapes and grape leaves embossed near the mouth end. Narrow, almost invisible slits are cut into four of the grape leaves. The beauty of the Dribble Glass, according to experts in the field, is that the victim is not aware that there is anything wrong with the glass. The water doesn't overflow. It just slides down the side of the tumbler, drips into the victim's hand and streams into his sleeve. The victim thinks his table manners are awkward. He wipes his mouth self-consciously. He looks around guiltily. He makes up his mind to sip his water gracefully, slowly. But all in vain. The Dribble Glass dribbles incessantly.

Another condition a joke novelty must meet to become a classic is that the victim, instead of being infuriated, must want to see another poor soul hoaxed.

"When I am fooling around with a new idea," Mr. Adams reveals, "I try to picture Mr. Average Man sitting around a cocktail lounge or in somebody's house before their weekly game of poker, and I try to ask myself if this new item will go in that sort of group, so if Person A pulls the gag on Person B, Person B will get a kick out of waiting for Person C to walk in and get the surprise of his life."

It was mainly for this reason that the Joy Buzzer-patent No. 1845735, which Adams considers his most remarkable invention-caught on in 1932 and sold like hot Joy Buzzers, although it was priced at one dollar, rather high for a jokers' novelty. The Joy Buzzer is a round tin box which is secreted in the fingers of the joker's hands. When he shakes hands with the victim, the infernal machine gives forth an ominous hum, and a sharp point is pressed into the dupe's palm, giving him the illusion of an electric shock.

The Pursuit of the Horse Laugh

"When pressed on the hack of somebody's neck, it feels like a live wire, or you leave it on a seat, boy, do they jump!" states Mr. Adams scientifically.

Oddly enough, when practical jokers worked the Buzzer, they found that instead of being punched in the nose, their victims would say, "Will you pull that gag on a friend of mine I'll bring around tomorrow?" The Buzzer helped to pull the S. S. Adams Company through the depression. Mr. Adams did not lay off a single hand or cut wages.

The psychology of the practical joker has never concerned Mr. Adams to any extent, as he is not of a philosophical turn of mind. He grows indignant when it is suggested that the people who purchase his products are only a cut above an imbecile.

"Listen," he says, "the smarter a man is, the more he appreciates a good laugh. The most brilliant man I know, ex-Governor Hoffman, of New Jersey, was one of my best customers. One summer when the governor was staying at Sea Girt, he bought more than two hundred of my Pop Ball Surprises, the most expensive item in the catalogue, and he worked the gag all summer on some of the most prominent people in the political and social world."

The Pop Ball Surprise, in the super-de-luxe version which retails for $4.75, is a gaily wrapped package, no bigger than a shoe box, which has the appearance of a Christmas present. When the cord is untied, the sides of the box fly apart, and no fewer than ninety-five balls - enough, as Mr. Adams says, to fill a barrel-jump out of the little box. The balls, made of honeycombed tissue, are as big as oranges, but, when compressed, can be tightly fitted into a small space.

Offhand, Mr. Adams names as the most eminent practical jokers he has known or heard of, Governor Hoffman, T. Coleman du Pont-who loved No.723, Explosive Package: "Three packages tied within each other. During the process of opening, there are eighteen explosions, and when the last package is opened a five-foot snake jumps out"-Bob Fit?simmons, Jack Dempsey, Comedian Milton Boric, Band-leader Richard Himber, Movie Director W. S. Van Dyke, Orson Welles and Henry Ford.

Some years ago, Adams gave one of the Joy Buzzers to a friend, G. A. Lyon, a manufacturer of auto parts in Detroit. Lyon showed the Buzzer to Ford, who was fascinated by its diabolical ingenuity. The next day Ford went through the River Rouge plant and devoted the entire day to giving electrical handshakes to foremen and minor executives of the Ford Motor Company.

Bob Fitzsimmons and Adams became fast friends in 1912, when the exheavyweight champion bought a farm in Dunellen, New Jersey. Fitz, a good-natured, exuberant boy who never grew up, always carried a supply of Adams' itching powder in a vest pocket, and when he was introduced to a stranger he dipped his thumb into the pocket and rubbed some of the powder against the victim's wrist while saying hello. Fitzsimmons' own epidermis had grown inured to nettle rash. He was particularly pleased, once, when he managed to switch one of the cigar bands of the brand Adams used to smoke on an Adams exploding cigar and saw the look of amazement on Ada'ms' face when the cigar blew up. Incidentally, exploding cigars do not really explode. They are now worked by a small spring, tied with a bit of cord which is burned away as the cigar burns down, thus releasing the spring. It seems that about thirty years ago, a Pennsylvania miner inserted a bit of, dynamite in a cigar and killed a man, and several states then passed laws against explosive cigars.

Among the irrepressible jokers of recent years is Richard Himber, the well-known maestro. Himber is an exuberant, roly-poly person, who relaxes from the tension of band rehearsals by setting traps for people along Broadway. He is a great one at telephoning somebody and imitating the voice of the victim's enemy. A series of pranks he played in Lindy's ten years ago is still talked about. Lindy's at the time was a late-evening haunt of comedians, singers, song writers, popular music publishers and song pluggers. Lindy's is owned and operated by a dour, choleric gentleman of German descent named Leo Lindeman. Lindy is not the type of host who jollies his customers along. He does not gossip or exchange the latest anecdotes with his clientele, as do some Broadway restaurateurs.

Himber began his series of practical jokes at Lindy's by slipping loaded cigars into a cigar box on the counter, by paying a bus boy five dollars to put cookies flavored with cayenne pepper on the tray of petits fours, and by pouring Foaming Sugar, a white powder, into the sugar shakers when nobody was looking. "When victim puts into tea or coffee," says an Adams' description of Foaming Sugar, "the contents foam over the top of the cup."

One night he placed one of Adams' Imitation Ink Blots, a piece of metal cut in the shape of a blob and painted black, on one of Lindy's precious tablecloths, and then he pretended to hold a leaky fountain pen over the table. Lindy beheld the sight and screamed in anguish. It wasn't bad enough that song writers dirtied up his tablecloths, scribbling their songs with pencils, now they were starting to use ink! Lindy's mouth gaped wide when Himber chortled, seized the ink blot off the cloth and hurled it to the ceiling.

Another time, Himber turned up with an Adams' Palpitator, or plate lifter. He placed the end of it under the tablecloth and pushed a bowl of borsch, a cold beet soup, one of Lindy's specialties, over on the Palpitator. Then Himber called Lindy over and complained that the borsch was tasteless, and, furthermore, it looked pallid.

Lindy," said Himber, "I think lately you've been watering the borsch."

Lindy said it was ridiculous. He lowered his head and started to sniff the borsch. Seizing the moment, Himber squeezed the bulb end of the Palpitator, and the plate of borsch tilted over, Lindy barely jerking his face away in time.

When a headwaiter showed him to a table, Himber would extend his hand and the headwaiter would shake it, expecting to receive the usual pourboire. Instead, the waiter got a taste of the Joy Buzzer.

"After a while," says Himber, chuckling, "I became mighty unpopular around Lindy's."

Mr. Adams is touchy about the dangerous implications of his trade, and says he never will manufacture any item which can injure a person physically or damage anybody's clothes or furniture-at any rate, beyond repair. "It ceases to be a joke when it does any serious damage," he says. "I have done a considerable amount of research on electrical shocking devices, once even fooled with a portable shocking unit that could be quickly wired to any chair, but I gave it up, as I figured there was too much risk in it, as some dumbbell is liable to go out and electrocute somebody with a weak heart."

Fifteen years ago he conceived the idea of a gimmick which, when fixed, gave off realistic clouds of smoke. He invested $7000 in a set of dies to produce the perforated tubes, bought quantities of chemicals and had 10,000 items made up as a starter. He tried the gag out on a member of the Rotary Club, of which he is past president. The victim, into whose coat pocket Adams had slipped the gimmick, saw the smoke, ripped off his coat, flung it on the floor and stamped on it. It seemed like a natural. Then Adams read an article about theater panics. He pictured some dimwitted joker placing it in somebody's overcoat in a theater and starting a panic. So he dropped the whole idea and never shipped a single smoke maker.

The S.S. Adams Company takes up 40,000 square feet of space in three buildings located by the raiiroad depot at Bradley Beach, which is one of a series of summer-resort towns located on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in Northern New Jersey. Approaching the factory, you imagine you are about to enter an old public building, as the main plant is a long three-story colonial structure with ivy twining over it, faded red-brick walls. A clock tower over the entrance gives it the mellowed air of the old State House in Boston.

On the ground floor dozens of men and women, with the intensity of watchmakers, are placing explosive springs into cigars, and percussion caps into books. Others, working on the thirty punch presses and five power presses, are stamping out imitation ink blots and imitation black-widow spiders from sheets of tin. Lathes, milling machines, jigsaws, scroll saws are methodically grinding out their quota of deviltry. Adams owns two of those remarkable automatic machines which, when a piece of metal is fed into their maws, turn out a completed jokers' novelty in five quick operations. One of the machines does everything but hand the item to a victim and laugh.

Adams sits at an unpretentious desk in a large office facing the railroad tracks. The office staff of five girls works in the same room. Most of the a day he is either trying to perfect new devices - he brings out twenty new dies each year - or improving old items. His pockets bulge with half-completed gadgets and with memoranda which he writes to himself. He jots ideas on the back of match packs, envelopes, scraps of paper. One reads: "Exploding apples, bananas, in fruit bowl? Shooting fruit bowl? Ha-ha."

Ideas, he says, may come from anywhere, and they usually come suddenly without any conscious effort on his, part, out of the blue.

Each week Adams receives several letters from amateur inventors. Their ideas are usually either stale, impractical or expensive. One chap in Pennsylvania has been submitting unusually ideas for twenty years. Typical of the weird suggestions is this one from a chap in Portland, Oregon:

Dear Sir: What do you think of this idea? I know you put out the large red rubber them: for hitchhikers a few years ago. Why not not a large skin-flesh-colored cloth thumb to slip over the red thumb; made up with the nail part painted with phosphorus paint to hitch hike at night. It glows. Or even made cheap out of cardboard or papier-mâché molded. Or a tiny red glass reflector or mirror stuck where nail is located, which will glitter when auto headlights shine on it.

"You can see," says Mr. Adams, with editorial crispness, "that this man has not given the basic elements of a joker's novelty much deep thought."

The future Ford of foolery was born Soren Sorenson Adams in Aarhus, Denmark, in 1869. His father was a sabot maker, who moved to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, when Sam-as he has always been called-was two years old. Sam never attended high school. In public school he was a mischievous boy, but probably no more so than the average boy. He put salt in the sugar bowl and pulled chairs out when people prepared to sit down. At twelve he went to work as a printer's devil for the Middlesex Democrat, a weekly paper published in Plainfield, New Jersey. He received one dollar a week. In his spare time he studied the art of pool, and became so competent that he took up pool playing as a livelihood and made a nice income on side bets.

He then discovered that he had a flair for shooting, and he took up trapshooting professionally and, for years, entered competitions all over the country. Between meets, he was a picture-frame salesman. In 1904, he shot 97 out of 100 at the Grand American Handicap in Indianapolis. This year was also significant as marking his first budding as a practical joker. He had always loved a little joke, and frequently gave out iron cigars and exploding cigars, which were then sold as a sideline by post-card and novelty shops at resort towns, Once, when he was courting a girl, he placed an imitation tin fly in her soup; the girl didn't see the humor of it and broke off their relationship.

In 1904 he was a salesman for a dye company, one of whose products was a German coal-tar derivative with which the firm had been having difficulty, as the people who processed it found it made them sneeze. At great expense, Sam's company extracted the sneezing ingredient. They had barrels of the ingredient lying around and one day Sam took some of the powder, a murky grayish stuff, and placed it in a bottle. The next time he saw a chance he placed some powder on the back of his hand and blew it into a roomful of people. The resulting consternation made him laugh his head off. After that, he was never without some sneezing powder, sad soon friends began asking him for the powder. It occurred to him that there were commercial possibilities in all this.

When he became dissatisfied with a hotel he was operating in York, Pennsylvania, he sold out his half interest to a partner for $1500 and set himself up as the Cachoo Sneeze Powder Company, in a one-room office and factory in an office building in Plainfield. He soon changed the firm name to S. S. Adams and Company, as the makers of bottles and corks were chary of extending credit to anything as bizarre as the Cachoo Sneeze Powder Company. At first, Adams did all the work himself. A chemist in Newark refined the powder for him. To this day, Adams is secretively mysterious about the name of the coal-tar dye or the identity of the powder. Adams himself poured it into bottles, corked it, packaged it and went out to sell it to novelty shops. Finally, George Zorn, of Philadelphia, who retails paper hats and noise makers for parties, ordered several gross, and, when they moved quickly, he ordered 50,000 bottles of Cachoo. The first year Adams sold $15,000 worth of Cachoo. Cachoo became a national craze. Church services, school sessions, theater performances and political meetings were thrown into disorder by clouds of sneezing powder. Newspapers wrote editorials against it. Fights in saloons started as a result of it. The mucous membranes in the noses of thousands of Americans were badly irritated as a result of too much Cachoo.

Adams followed up Cachoo with a Shooting Cigarette Box and a Shooting Book, the latter bearing a deceptive cover reading: A Night in Paris. The following year ho was out with the Dribble Glass. The year 1910 was chiefly important for his discovery of jumping-snake items. His first snake whimsey was a three-foot serpent in a jar of jam. Ho developed a reddish preparation which, when mixed with birdseed and painted around the inside of a jar, perfectly resembled the look of strawberry jam.

"No one has ever touched my improved jam formula," he says. "It's a funny thing, but you take my jar of jam and put it alongside a real jar of lam, and it looks better than the real lam. Strive as they will, the Japs or the Germans or anybody in this country could not touch it, not to this day."

The snakes are currently five feet long, and constructed of springs encased in green cambric, and you can buy them not only compressed inside of jam jars but also in cold-cream jars, cigar lighters, jewel boxes, in a book with the title What I Know About Women, in a can of nuts, and even in a screw-top fountain pen.

Adams also has an eight-foot snake in a large jar, which he has never marketed. "Biggest darn jumping snake in the whole world," he says proudly.

Mr. Adams is legally separated from his wife, a fact which may cause no surprise to any wife of a practical joker, although Mr. Adams has long ago ceased playing practical jokes on his friends and neighbors and hasn't given away an explosive cigar or a shooting book for twenty years. He has two married daughters and a son, Joseph (Bud) Adams, twenty-nine years old, who is in charge of the tool-and-die department at the factory. Bud is as solemn person as his father, and never plays any jokes with the Adams contraptions.

Around Asbury Park, Adams has the reputation of being a solid, respectable, slightly stuffy person who is almost never hilarious, jocular or prankish. "If you met Adams for the first time," an acquaintance says, "you would never take him for a manufacturer of sneezing powder and jumping snakes."

Adams leads a conventional life playing contract bridge twice a week and fishing or hunting whenever he has a chance. He is president of the Wheelmen's Club, of Asbury Park, the oldest men's group in the city, and he is also president of the Turtle Cove Gun Club, whose members shoot waterfowl at Barnegat Bay each autumn. In the winter he shoots in North Carolina in the summer he fishes in Virginia.

Adams lives alone in a small four room apartment. There are no collapsing chairs or exploding books around the place, which is furnished modestly with Grand Rapids nonshooting furniture. There is a little balcony outside his living room. During the late Sunday afternoons, in warm weather, Adams likes to stand on the balcony and take the air. From where he stands, be can see boardwalk and the ocean, and watch the bathers disporting on the beach.

"It gave me an idea," he says, "upon which I have been expending a deal of thought - a bathing suit made of a material that would disintegrate when the victim went into the water. Can't you just picture the look of surprise on their faces? Boy, it sure would be a darn funny joke novelty, but haven't perfected it. However, I am still working on the idea." THE END
 
 

Content Copyright © 1999 S. S. Adams Co., Neptune, New Jersey, U.S.A.  All Rights Reserved.