Rhubarb

Rhubarb, they called him. Mr. Rhubarb, really. Mr. Jonathan “Rye” Rhubarb. He owned the biggest rye bread factory in the state, back in the day. Come to think of it, they actually called him “Rye” far more often than they ever called him Rhubarb. Sometimes they just called him Jon.

Ol’ Rye Rhubarb’s Rhubarb Rye was the most popular artisinal rye in the region for many years, but one day Rye decided to leave the life of the bread magnate behind. “I shall dance in the Indian Ocean! Peel lemons in Madagascar! Buy fireworks just outside Reno!” he declared as he shambled drunkenly out the doors of the Rhubarb Building for the last time.

Rye sold his bread factory to Welsh industrialist Delwyn Llewellyn, who converted it into a mail-order submarine sandwich factory. Llewellyn named his new venture The Welsh Hoagie. It failed spectacularly. Most locals were unfamiliar with the term hoagie, and mistook Llewellyn’s business for a mail-order brothel.

Llewellyn printed up flyers and posters pointing out the absurdity of a mail-order brothel, but by then it was too late. The Welsh Hoagie was doomed. The factory was abruptly shuttered one Tuesday afternoon, putting over 37,000 people out of work. About 22,000 of them descended on the factory later that night.

In between songs about worker solidarity and racist Welsh stereotypes, the newly-unemployed hoagie workers found time to steal over 8,000 pounds of rotting cold cuts and burn the factory to the ground. Much of the rancid meat was dumped into the Rhubarb River, where it continued to hamper boat traffic for months. The rest was formed into a giant hoagie, the likes of which no one in the county had ever seen before!

A representative of the Guinness Book of World Records was contacted, but she couldn’t make it to town before half the hoagie had been devoured by raccoons and coyotes and such. There was even a panther named Felix who could read your mind and later became the first big cat to land a job on Wall Street! But that’s a story for another day…

In this story, a lot of the workers ended up moving to Michigan and getting jobs in the auto industry. Everything went pretty smoothly after that. Pretty darn smoothly.