Life Savers, the iconic, brightly-colored, ring-shaped candies, were developed right here in Ohio by Cleveland chocolate manufacturer Clarence A. Crane, the father of poet Hart Crane.
Clarence Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, southeast of Cleveland between Cleveland and Akron. Clarence’s father, Arthur Crane, was the richest man in Garrettsville. He ran a successful maple syrup business and was director of the town’s First National Bank. Clarence was expected to take over the maple business as his father’s only son. But after dropping out of Alleghany College, Clarence took a job as a travelling salesman selling cookies for the National Biscuit Company out of Akron, Ohio. That didn’t last long and he was back home working for the family maple business.
He married in 1898, moved out of Garrettsville in 1903, setting up his own maple syrup cannery in Trumball County, on a loan from his steel magnate father-in-law. By 1907 his company was the largest maple syrup cannery in the world. In 1908 he sold the company to the Corn Products Refining Company, which became Argo.
On a trip to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1910, Clarence was introduced to a chocolate “so good it could make him rich,” most probably the confections of Charles Rogers, who had started making chocolates in Victoria in 1885. Crane tried to get the company to give him a franchise in Cleveland, but they refused. He then had the chocolate chemically analyzed and began to make a cloned version in Cleveland called Queen Victoria Chocolates and later Mary Garden Chocolates. Mary Garden was an operatic soprano from Scotland who performed in several opera houses in Chicago between 1910 and 1932, which is where Crane probably came into contact with her. She was a household name in America in the 1910s. Sales of chocolate dropped in the summer of 1912 and Clarence decided he needed to find a candy that could withstand the summer heat.
He invested in a pill making machine used to make flat pills. With help from a local pharmacist, Crane used translucent caramel and put it into the machine, developing a round candy with a hole in the center. He noticed the candy resembled the life preservers used on ships and named the candy Life Savers. The Titanic sank that same year, perhaps influencing the name of the candy. Originally, they only came in peppermint flavor and were wrapped in cardboard tubes with the name Peppermint Life Savers. Crane marketed them as a breath mint to combat the national Halitosis Crisis. The label showed a sailor throwing a life saver to a woman.
In 1913, the candy came into the notice of a New York marketing executive, E. J. Noble. He approached Crane with a marketing campaign. Although Crane rejected the offer, in probably his worst business decision, he sold Noble the rights for the Life Saver brand for a measly $2900. Soon after the candy was under the ownership of Noble, and the Life Savers and Candy Company was formed. Noble also marketed the candies as a breath mint, but with a different packaging. He wrapped them in tin foil instead of cardboard to keep the flavor from leeching into the packaging, and marketed them to saloons and bars, as well as groceries and restaurants, to be placed near the cash registers. They were sold for 5 cents a roll and soon became a smash hit, especially among children. From a minimal investment, Noble became a multi-millionaire and marketed what would become an iconic American candy, invented in Ohio.
By 1915 Noble and Allen were producing Life Savers themselves and no longer used Crane as a supplier. Although Crane did not benefit from their later success, his chocolate business continued to expand. The Crane Chocolate Co. was incorporated in 1916 and by 1921 it had sales outlets in New York and Kansas City. Crane chocolates were served as dessert on the Northern Pacific Railway in the 1910s and carried at Marshall Fields Department Stores. Starting in 1916, Crane would employ the well-known artist Maxfield Parrish to design three chocolate boxes for him – Rubiaiyat (1916), Cleopatra (1917) and Garden of Allah (1918).
An ad for Burroughs Bookkeeping machines (early calculators) in the Saturday Evening Post quoted Clarence Crane on his chocolates:
“One reason Clarence Crane’s Chocolates are so perfect is that they are made in a model factory – so fragrant, clean and attractive that Elbert Hubbard called it “A Chocolate Studio.”
“By surrounding his chocolates with refinement and individuality, Crane has shown that he is an artist. It is not surprising that Mary Garden permitted him to have his chocolates named after her, and that Maxfield Parrish has been willing to paint pictures for the chocolate boxes.”
“But Mr. Crane is more than an artist – he is a wide-awake businessman. He applied originality in the arrangement of his stores; and in the accounting department he used methods that enable him to keep a finger on the pulse of business.”
Early flavors of Life Savers included root beer, cola, cinnamon, clove, anise, licorice, butter rum, wintergreen, chocolate, and malted milk. In 1921 five fruit flavored (orange, lemon, lime, pineapple and cherry) Life Savers we know and love today debuted, with each flavor in different packs. During World War II, other candy companies donated their sugar rations to the company so that Life Savers could be included in the military meal rations to offer soldiers a taste of home. Lifesaver Limited merged with the Beech-Nut Corporation in 1956. Then in 1981 Beech-Nut merged with Nabisco, and in 1992 released Lifesaver Gummies. In 2000, Kraft acquired Nabisco, and then they were bought out in 2008 by the Mars Corporation, which now produces Life Savers.
The maple syrup, chocolate, and Life Saver fortune funded the tumultuous career of his son, queer poet Hart Crane, whose epic poem Bridge, set under the Brooklyn Bridge, and written in the same apartment in Brooklyn where Washington Roebling saw its completion, sought to lyrically chronicle the American industrial age. Crane’s poetry inspired many other American poets and playwrights, including E. E. Cummings, Eugene O’Neill, T. S. Elliot, Tennessee Williams, and many others.
Crane embarked upon several other business ventures before his death on 6 July 1931, including a restaurant in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, called Crane’s Canary Cottage.
Hart Crane committed suicide a year after his father’s death by jumping off a cruise ship into the Gulf of Mexico on the way back from Mexico. In true irony, he refused a life preserver that was thrown to him. His body was never recovered.
dannwoellertthefoodetymologist 