As a result of a labor dispute, Hostess — the makers of the Twinkie, that joyous, anti-nutritious concoction that has long been a favorite of hefty American children, myself included — is going out of business.
Nooooooo! It’s bad enough that thousands of workers will lose their jobs, but can it really be that the Twinkie will go the way of the Dodo? How can a cruel world deprive youngsters of the finger-licking pleasures of cream-filled, yellow sponge-caked goodness, dipped in milk?
I therefore republish the Webner House Ode to a Twinkie, not in celebration, but in sorrow:
O Twinkie! My Twinkie!
O Twinkie! My Twinkie! The noon hour now draws nigh
My morning classes will be done, to you my thoughts do fly
The bell will ring, the rush will start, and we will race to lunch
The crinkled paper bag will ope, on PBJ I’ll munch
But O! Dessert! Dessert!
My hungry heart doth beat
For in my sack I soon shall find
A cream-filled sponge cake treat.
O Twinkie! My Twinkie! Your sponge cake damp and gold
And filled with tasty frosting, sweet and white and bold
The wrapper tears, my eyes grow wide, the sticky mass I grasp
And clutch to waiting bosom like Cleo and the asp
And so to eat! To eat! To eat!
With glass of milk, ice cold
Then lick till clean the bottom square
Of its crumbs, wet and gold.
O Twinkie! My Twinkie! My lustrous sack lunch friend
The sight of you gives rise to thoughts of lunch’s happy end
Your taste I crave, and I desire to see you on my plate
I do not mind if you are made of calcium sulfate
Fear not, my friend! Fear not! Fear not!
We’ll eat you still with pride
Come Polysorbate 60, hell,
or grim diglyceride!
I’m sure the Twinkie will survive a bankruptcy. As we all know, Twinkies will last forever and are the foodstuff most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust. Still, it is disturbing that the company that makes one of the most classic American foods ever — a true staple of the school day sack lunch, and even mentioned in Ghostbusters — is being squeezed by sugar, flour, and labor costs.
I don’t care. Although I no longer eat Twinkies, they are a fondly remembered staple of my grade school and junior high packed lunches. And so, in the honor of the Twinkie and its epic contribution to the lunch times of generations of American children, I offer this bit of doggerel (with apologies to Walt Whitman and his poem, 
The corner grocery store about a block and a half from my college apartment at 101 West 8th Avenue in Columbus specialized in cheap beer. How surprising in a campus community! On any given Friday afternoon, a stroll down to the store would find a frenzied press of students of The Ohio State University rushing to buy as much beer — that is, as much dirt-cheap beer — as the wallet could bear. The store’s stock of foodstuffs consisted of three categories — (1) various forms of beef jerky, (2) Hostess Bakery products like Twinkies, Ho Hos and cupcakes, and (3) beer. Approximately 99.7 percent of the store’s available footage was devoted to beer.
The ’70s really was the golden hour for cheap beer. A visit to the corner grocery might find several cases of warm Billy Beer laid in, or Burger Beer, or Blatz, or even a totally generic brew in a white can with the black-stenciled label “BEER.” Of the various choices, however, the preferred selection was Robin Hood Cream Ale. A six-pack of 16-ounce cans cost $1.19, which meant that you could properly greet the coming weekend in style for an amount that usually could be cobbled together by carefully checking the sofa cushions. Unlike, say, Billy Beer, which really was undrinkable except in extremis, Robin Hood had a decent taste. It also featured a guy who looked like Woodrow the Woodsman lifting a flagon of frothy brew, and a slogan that had “Ye” in it. What could be classier?
Webner House 