BobRo Archives: Twinkies

With the bankruptcy of Hostess Bakeries and the fate of Twinkies still to be determined, I was reminded of a time when we had more of those creme-filled golden cakes than anyone could eat in a lifetime. From a column first published back in 2000...

  Back in 1976, DC, with the help of then-New York convention king and distribution guru Phil Seuling, decided to run a convention at NYC’s Commodore Hotel to celebrate Superman’s birthday. The plans were plagued with problems, the most severe being a strike by hotel workers the day before the convention, prompting a last-minute move to the Americana Hotel.
  DC President Sol Harrison convinced Hostess Bakeries, makers of Cupcakes, Fruit Pies and Twinkies and one of our major advertisers at the time, to donate some baked goods as door prizes. However, I don’t think even Sol expected that we would get quite so many Twinkies. Boxes and boxes of the creme-filled cakes, enough to fill two huge canvas mail bins, arrived at the hotel!
   At first, we were giving a Twinkie or two to each person who came through the door -- nothing like a little sugar fix to rev you up for a convention! By the second day, however, it was obvious that we had a lot more Twinkies than we had convention-goers, so we started to give out boxes of ten.
   Even that didn’t seem to make a dent in the supply! By the end of the convention, we were handing departing fans as many boxes of Twinkies as they could carry. Comics dealers were given cartons of them. DC staffers got as many as they wanted.
  The rest -- and there were still plenty -- ended up in the DC office, where anybody who could still stand to look at one could enjoy it as a snack.