09/03/2026
A twelve year old boy lost both legs under a New Orleans streetcar. More than a century later the city is still buying candy from that family. 🍬
Sam Cortese was the son of Sicilian immigrants. The accident took both legs below the knee, and the schools of that era simply put him out. His father built him a cart pulled by goats, and the boy went to work as a street vendor, selling fruit and vegetables out of it.
What sold best was not the produce. It was the taffy his mother made at holidays, and when the leftovers moved faster than the vegetables, Sam Cortese figured out what business he was actually in.
In 1915, at twenty five, he commissioned a wagon from the wheelwright Thomas Brinker, and what he asked for was not a cart. It was a candy factory on wheels. Windows all the way around so customers could watch. Running water. A marble slab for cooling. A brass hook for pulling the taffy. He could drive it from inside while he worked.
Three flavors then. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. Three flavors now.
He named the company Roman Chewing Candy rather than anything Sicilian, on the theory that Roman would sell to everybody. He worked the wagon himself until a few months before he died in 1969.
In the early 1970s his grandson Ron Kottemann took it over, and he is still out there, in the same 1915 wagon, behind a mule named Miss Mae who knows the uptown routes well enough that he can pull taffy while she walks and steer her by voice. His son Daniel is next.
Kottemann's first day selling was outside Tulane Stadium, where the Sugar Bowl used to be played. That stadium was torn down in 1980.
The wagon that parked outside it is still working.
A hundred and eleven years. No factory, no franchise, no second location. One mule at a time. 🍬
