This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours.

Send them to Our American Stories.com.

They're some of our favorites. As you know,

we're a nation of immigrants, but it's not just people that travel. It's also their ideas.

One of these ideas is something that many of us loved as kids. Sean Peterson of the Pez

Visitor Center is author of Pez, from Austrian invention to American icon, and he's

here to share how it evolved into the brick-shaped candy dispenser that we all know and love today.

Here's Sean.

Pez, the brand or the candy, was invented by a man named Edward Haas III.

He was an Austrian.

The family had been very successful in a variety of businesses up to that point,

and they had a nice business providing baking products.

And one of the things Mr. Haas noticed was people were having a difficult time

digesting some of the cakes based on some of the ingredients that were in them and found that peppermint

oil was a good way to help in the digestion and a byproduct of that you know it was a way to

freshen your breath and most of all he really wanted to provide an alternative to smoking.

He was very much a man ahead of his time and didn't really think too much of smoking

and the health ramifications of that.

So his goal was to kind of come up with an alternative to that.

And he found peppermint oil and through this what's

called a cold press method where you just kind of press the ingredients together, came up with

these little Pez tablets as the product and wanted to see if there was interest.

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