the age of 102, and was the cook at Moon’s Lake House. She first invented and fried the famous Saratoga Chips." Wicks recalled the invention of Saratoga Chips as an accident: she had "chipped off a piece of the potato which, by the merest accident, fell into the pan of fat. She fished it out with a fork and set it down upon a plate beside her on the table." Her brother tasted it, declared it good, and said, "We’ll have plenty of these." In a 1932 interview with the Saratogian newspaper, her grandson, John Gilbert Freeman, asserted Wicks's role as the true inventor of the potato chip. Hugh Bradley's 1940 history of Saratoga contains some information about Speck, based on local folklore as much as on any specific historical primary sources. In their 1983 article in Western Folklore, Fox and Banner say that Bradley had cited an 1885 article in the Hotel Gazette about Speck and BI the potato chips. Bradley repeated some material from that article, including that "Crum was born in 1828, the son of Abe Speck, a mulatto jockey who had come from Kentucky to Saratoga Springs and married a Stockbridge Indian woman," and that, "Crum also claimed to have considerable German and Spanish blood." In any event, Speck helped popularize the potato chip, first as a cook at Moon's and then in his own place. Cary Moon, owner of Moon’s Lake House, later rushed to claim credit for the invention, and began mass-producing the chips, first served in paper cones, then packaged in boxes. They became wildly popular: "It was at Moon’s that Clio first tasted the famous Saratoga chips, said to have originated there, and it was she who first scandalized spa society by strolling along Broadway and about the paddock at the race track crunching the crisp circlets out of a paper sack as though they were candy or peanuts. She made it the fashion, and soon you saw all Saratoga dipping into cornucopias filled with golden-brown paper-thin potatoes; a gathered crowd was likely to create a sound like a scuffling through dried autumn leaves." Visitors to Saratoga Springs were advised to take the 10-mile journey around the lake to Moon's if only for the chips: "the hobby of the Lake House is Fried Potatoes, and these they serve in good style. They are sold in papers like confectionary." A 1973 advertising campaign