The bubble gum thing was because I heard that Bruce was in the bussiness, or is that just myth?
Bruce did indeed own Concord Confections, which in turn owned Dubble Bubble, but that Factory was in Toronto Canada.
He sold the business to Tootsie Roll about 5 years ago.
For a few years after that, he regularly had pallets of Dubble Bubble that he would pass out.
The buckets of gum are now all gone, unfortunately.
The idea of featuring SMART as a marque was hopefully to get some American small car enthusiasts introduced to Vintage Microcars.
The car culture in the US is indeed very different than in Europe. Most of the media and the general public think the SMART is a microcar and are genuinely surprised to find that something else smaller actually exists.
The response from SMART owners so far has been a bit less than expected, but oh well.
2 years ago we featured the King Midget, which is an American Microcar. We did this because the King Midget people usually seem to stick together as a marque and it turned out to be quite successful getting them to mix it up with other vintage microcars. Many of them are coming back this year.