"You know what else is in
Madison? The
Dubble Bubble Ranch."
I'd have thought he was making it up, except that the Dubble Bubble Ranch
sitting outside a small, picturesque town in the Southern state of Georgia made exactly the
weird sort of sense that seems to glue the South together. Whatever the
Dubble Bubble Ranch is.
Hop on I-20 in Atlanta, drive 50 miles east to
Morgan County, and take Highway 441 south a couple
of miles. You're outside of Madison, a town that prides itself on not getting burned to the ground by Sherman. Look for the sign that says Dubble Bubble Acres. Let me know
what it's like, because I've only read that it exists. If the rumors hold true, though, this is something of an oddity.
As it turns out, the plot is owned by a man named Bruce Weiner, who owns
a company called Concord Confections. Concord Confections, as you might have
guessed, is responsible for churning out Dubble Bubble Bubble Gum, the
neon-pink sugar-wads responsible for many a cavity in the teeth of those
who were still trick-or-treating in the late 1980s. What's
interesting, though, is that Concord Confections is named for the town in
which it sits-- and that town is in Ontario, Canada,
Mr. Weiner is apparently a high-profile collector of European
"microcars", a
sort of tiny automobile that looks like a Hanna-Barbera creation but was
actually manufactured during the decade following World War II to supply the
needs of a war-shattered Europe. His collection is housed at Dubble Bubble Acres, in the Bruce Weiner Microcar
Museum.
Word is that the Dubble Bubble Acres-- where Mr. Weiner
occasionally hosts showings of his tiny cars-- is either the bubblegum king's primary residence or his weekend home (depends on who you ask), and that he periodically commutes from Madison to Ontario in a private plane.
What brings an Ontario bubblegum salesman to purchase a plot of land
in the State of Georgia and stuff it with tiny cars is a mystery that remains to be solved.
http://www.microcarmuseum.com/info.html
http://www.microcar.org/2003/index.html
http://www.dubblebubble.com