Just wonder — bread firm is turning 90

To some folks, it represents bland and boring processed food. It's a low-carb dieter's worst nightmare.

But for others, it's the best thing since, well, sliced bread.

Wonder Bread is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. A company press release gives the brand credit for a few terms we commonly use today, such as "the best thing since sliced bread" and "the Wonder years."

That may be giving a little too much credit to a loaf of bread. But I do know there's a well-known one-man play called "The Wonder Bread Years."

Baby boomers likely remember the well-known ad campaign of "helps build strong bodies 12 ways." Did anyone ever figure out what those 12 ways were?

When I was a kid, my mom made homemade bread. During school lunch, I envied my friends who had sandwiches on neat, uniformly sliced white Wonder bread. Ironically, many of my friends envied ME because of my homemade bread.

Today, my family pretty much sticks with whole wheat bread. But, they still prefer the uniform slices of "store bought" wheat bread over my homemade version. History repeats itself.

According to company lore, inspiration for the Wonder brand came when Taggart Baking Co. executive Elmer Cline was "filled with wonder" by the sight of hundreds of balloons at the International Balloon Race at the Indianapolis Speedway.

The colorful balloons have been part of the Wonder Bread package ever since. In 1925, the Continental Baking Co. purchased Taggart.

Historians credit Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, with inventing the first loaf-at-a-time bread-slicing machine. It was first used commercially by the Chillicothe Baking Co. in 1928, with a product called "Kleen Maid Sliced Bread." But Wonder Bread is credited with marketing the first sliced bread nationwide in 1930.

Interestingly enough, during 1943, U.S. officials imposed a short-lived ban on sliced bread as a wartime conservation measure.

The "Builds strong bodies," ad campaign came out of a government-sponsored program of enriching white bread with vitamins and minerals to combat disease. In the 1950s, the company sponsored "Howdy Doody" on TV, which host Buffalo Bob Smith telling the audience, "Wonder Bread builds strong bodies 8 ways." By the 1960s, Wonder Bread used the slogan "Helps build strong bodies 12 ways," referring to the number of added nutrients.