"The building holds a secret.
A vile and totally eeeewwwww secret, one that brings together 12-year-olds and 12-year-olds at heart.
From the outside, it is another two-story brick warehouse on Chicago's West Side. Step inside, and visitors return to a certain back-of-the-comic-books kind of American childhood.
The secret is this: It's the world capital of fake vomit, where it's still made the old-fashioned American way, ladle by ladle, formed and coagulated for the next generation of pranksters and troublemakers.
Helping put the ick in America since 1941, Fun Inc. is a repository of practical jokes, magic tricks and gag items -- from chattering teeth to hot pepper gum, oversize sunglasses to oversize toothbrushes to oversize anything. The building, near Grand and Major Avenues in the industrial Hansen Park neighborhood, is where springs were once manufactured and, later, Cracker Jack prizes.
Guests walking into the office of Fun Inc. President Graham Putnam might expect to be greeted by a joy-buzzer handshake or a whoopee cushion planted beneath a chair seat. But it is surprisingly bare bones, a room he shares with his wife, Kathryn, the company's corporate secretary and a clutter of paperwork and faux wood paneling. Fake vomit, it turns out, is serious business..."
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