By Ashley Lister
Our theme this week is anniversaries. This blog post goes
live on July 7th. And July 7th marks the anniversary of
the first commercially produced and distributed loaves of slices bread.
On July 7th, 1928, (according to Wikipedia) the
Chillicothe Baking Company, Missouri, produced their first sliced loaf. It was
the world’s first commercially produced sliced loaf.
The slicing was done by a machine invented by Otto Frederick
Rohwedder. It was a machine capable of converting a whole loaf into slices of
even and uniform thickness.
The sliced loaves were then marketed under the slogan, “The
greatest step forward in baking since bread was wrapped.” It will come as a
surprise to no one that this gave rise to the popular saying, “The greatest thing
since sliced bread.”
And I mention this because I figured we could tie our anniversary
in with the anniversary of the sliced loaf by having commentors contribute uniform
‘slices’ of a composite poem.
The rules are straightforward. Simply write one ten syllable
line of poetry in the comments box and we’ll see if we can compile them into a
full length poem. It doesn't have to be profound. It only has to be a single 'slice' of poetry. I'm going to submit the first one below:
The greatest thing since the first slice of bread
Hopefully, if there are enough lines, I can assemble this into a poem for a forthcoming weekend.
Ash