Everywhere you look in the Friedman household, you see smiles.
Most of the smiles are on the happy-faced characters in the Friedmans' collection. They're into M&M candy memorabilia, and the M&M characters are just about the happiest advertising characters around.

The other smiles are provided by the Friedmans themselves. Why not? They've discovered a hobby rich with material, literally thousands of items worth collecting, and one that involves them in an international community of collectors.

Stan and Geri are founding members of the international M&M Collectors Club, a 300-member group with an annual convention and growing participation.

You'd think that a single candy brand is too specialized for this much enthusiasm. But in the candy advertising field, M&M collectibles easily outclass every other brand. Collectors appreciate the bright colors and creative character design, and the company caters to them with an impressive variety of memorabilia.

The Friedmans' main interest is in the paper advertising - a niche within the niche - and there's a long history of material for them to seek out.
The collecting couple traces the history of M&Ms back to the 1940s. The early history is a bit murky, but it's clear that the candy's name came from the initials of two founding fathers of the product, Forrest Mars and Bruce Murray.
Forrest Mars was the son of Frank C. Mars, a Minnesota native who started Mars Inc. as a small business in Tacoma, Wash. in 1911. By the time Forrest came of age, Mars candies were well established, but as the story goes, Frank wanted Forrest to make his own way. With partner Murray, a member of the Hershey family, Forrest came up with a new product: chocolate morsels coated with a hard candy shell, a perfect finger food for the sweet-toothed. There are various conflicting stories about the original inspiration, said Stan, including a credible story that the recipe originated with soldiers in the Spanish civil war. In any case, the design was patented on March 3, 1941, and M&Ms (shorthand for "Mars and Murray") were born.

It was a brief childhood for this snack food. World War II soon brought rationing rules for a number of raw materials used for consumer products, including the cocoa needed to make chocolate. But like Spam, Melmac and the paperback book, M&M candy was given an early boost because of the problems posed by an overseas ground war. M&Ms were marketed to the military as a portable treat for soldiers, because they could be eaten without a chocolate mess - a selling point during and after the war. At this time they were packaged in brown paper tubes, which are exceedingly rare collectibles today. The Friedmans do have one artifact of military M&M use: a matchbook cover advertising the candies as "available at your PX."

The postwar period brought relief from rationing, but new problems of marketing. Forrest Mars became a pioneer of the modern marketing survey, and discovered that while children preferred his product to other chocolate candies, they didn't have the cash to buy it. He set out to sell M&Ms to moms, not kids, hence the famous phrase, "The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand," a message that implied kids could eat these treats without messing up their clothing.

Advertising was placed in homemaker's magazines, but also on television, and M&Ms were among the first snack foods to try TV ads, using the "clean hands" theme. The Friedmans have a big collection of magazine advertising and a set of videotapes of the early ads.

The product underwent some fine tuning in the next couple of decades. The company started printing the letter "M" on its candies in 1950 to differentiate M&Ms from rivals. At first the "M" logo was black, but it was changed to the more prominent white in 1954. Also in 1954, chocolate-covered peanuts were added to the repertoire, and that was the year the cartoon characters and the "melts in your mouth" slogan first appeared.
Through this period, the maker of M&Ms was Food Products Manufacturing, the company Forrest co-founded in 1940. In 1964, however, Forrest took over his father's candy firm, Mars Inc., and brought M&Ms into the family firm. He and his siblings built Mars into one of the world's biggest food companies, with 30,000 employees and products that include Milky Way and Snickers candy bars, Dove ice cream treats, Combos and Twix snacks, and pet food brands Kal Kan and Pedigree.

Mars Inc. has an unusual corporate atmosphere, according to Joel Glenn Brenner, author of Emperors of Chocolate, and one of few outsiders to get a peek into this closely-held family business. According to Brenner, everyone at Mars Inc. knows everyone else's salary, and bonuses at all levels are strictly based on attendance and performance. There are no private offices, no meetings, no presentations, no memos. Issues are handled in ordinary conversations, on a first name basis, and the Mars family - one of the wealthiest families in the country - works at a group of modest desks in the same room as the rest of the administration.

Their flagship product, M&M candies, joined the space age when they were included in the space shuttle food supply beginning with the first flight in 1981. M&Ms also became an Olympics sponsor beginning with the Los Angeles summer games in 1984. Through the 1980s, the company tried some innovative marketing, issuing new color blends for Christmas and Easter. And the M&Ms characters began to appear as a trickle of licensed products that soon became a flood.

That's just about when Stan Friedman entered the scene. Geri had taken the lead as the family collector, and she has amassed nice selections of furnishings and décor over the years, but Stan was looking for something fun to collect too. He found it in M&M memorabilia, from the very first item in his collection, a character wristwatch.

These plush figures demonstrate design changes from the 1980s M&M ad character, at left, to the late 1990s, right.

The collection grew, as collections will. Though they specialize in print advertising, the Friedmans have a colorful bunch of containers, dispensers, figures and figurines, dolls, wall decorations, books, puzzles, school supplies and household items. There are 40 different fabrics with M&M designs and sewing patterns to make pillows, curtains, aprons and more. There are items associated with NASA, the Olympics and NASCAR, since Mars is an auto racing sponsor. When someone at the company notice "MM" is the Roman numeral for "2000," M&Ms became the "official candy of the new millennium," and a number of the Friedmans' collectibles are tie-ins to that promotion.

Collectibles from before 1960 are exceptionally scarce. The Friedmans have one wholesale packing box that they date to the 1950s, but other early items have been elusive.

Some of the most expensive items are electronics such as radios, telephones, cameras and even a karaoke machine, but some of the most prized items for the Friedmans are from other countries.
The couple recalls one trip to London where they frequented candy shops but only found British sweets - until they decided to exchange their currency at the airport just before leaving. "We went into the duty-free shop and we hit the motherlode," said Geri, "stuff we'd never seen before." No need to change currency, because they spent all but one pound on M&M collectibles.

European M&M figures are well-made, fun
and hard to find in the U.S.

M&Ms collectors can enjoy political tie-ins, too. President Reagan brought M&Ms to the White House for a trip he made to the Soviet Union, when he chose the candies as a healthier alternative to the traditional gift of American cigarettes. M&Ms became a regular candy prize in the annual Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn, and guests have since been given M&M packages personalized for each president.

For years, the Friedmans were on their own as collectors. They even wrote to the Mars company asking about a collector's network, but the candy makers didn't know of any.

"Before the Internet, it was hard to find anybody," said Stan. But in 1998, he noticed that others were repeatedly bidding for M&M items in Internet auctions, and he contacted them. The discussion led to the founding of the M&M Collectors Club that fall. Since M&Ms are an international product, there's an international club membership, in the U.S., Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Great Britain, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore - so far. The club's web site is at www.mnmclub.com.

Stan is currently vice president of the club, and is helping plan its third annual convention, to be held March 22-24 at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas. The location was chosen because Las Vegas is the home of M&M World, the company's own museum and collectibles showplace.

Geri confessed that they've tailored their most important investment, their home, to serve their collection. When they moved to Minnesota from Florida, they went looking for a house with a collection room, a space with no closets and plenty of wall space to accommodate shelving.

The attraction of these collectibles for Geri is that they're happy and colorful - as the club motto says, they're the collectibles that smile back. "One nice thing about it is that it spans all ages," she said. "You can start as a child of eight, or as a child of 88."

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