The Moon­Pie, the del­i­cacy of choice for work­ing men across Amer­ica dur­ing the first half of the 20th Cen­tury, was cre­ated in 1917 by Earl Mitchell while work­ing his ter­ri­tory of Ken­tucky, Ten­nessee and West Vir­ginia for The Chat­tanooga Bak­ery of Chat­tanooga, Ten­nessee. As the story goes, Mr. Mitchell was vis­it­ing a com­pany store that catered to the coal min­ers of the sur­round­ing area when he engaged some of them in con­ver­sa­tion. While chat­ting with them he asked what they might enjoy for a snack dur­ing a gru­el­ing, filthy day of min­ing. They told Mitchell that they wanted some­thing that would be solid and filling.

“About how big?” Mr. Mitchell asked them. At the time the moon was ris­ing, so a miner held out his hands, fram­ing the moon in them and said, “About that big!”

He headed back to the bak­ery after mak­ing his rounds and saw some of the work­ers dip­ping gra­ham crack­ers into marsh­mal­low and lay­ing them on win­dow sills to harden. With a con­cept for the per­fect work­ing man’s snack, he added another cookie and a coat­ing of choco­late and sent them back for the work­ers to try. When the response they got was favor­able he sent sam­ples around with their other sales­peo­ple, too. The Moon­Pie was a hit.

The usual way to enjoy a Moon­Pie in the 1950’s was with an RC Cola, which, when cou­ple with a Moon­Pie, cost about 10 cents. RC was pre­ferred since the RC bot­tle was a lit­tle larger than that of Coca-Cola. The two became insep­a­ra­ble and was often referred to as “The Work­ing Man’s Lunch.” [1. The info for this piece came from the maker of one half of the Work­ing Man’s Lunch — The Chat­tanooga Bak­ery.]