Sugar Baby

By Kelly McManus

September 2026

I was a bad baby, or so I was told. My parents had no idea what to do with me. I came screeching into their lives a year and a half after they married. They were still kids. My dad was just starting his senior year of college, and my mom was working as a lowly clerk in the hospital where I was born. During the day I went to a babysitter and apparently enjoyed a good reputation, but the moment I crossed the threshold back home to our tiny, rundown apartment, the wailing would commence. Nothing would appease me.

Sugar Baby Kelly, happily licking frosting off of a pair of beaters.

Canned baby formula wasn’t available in the mid-1950’s when I was born, or if it was, we couldn’t afford it. My poor, exhausted mother, after working all day at the hospital, would stay up all night cooking elaborate baby formulas from scratch that her various medical acquaintances at the hospital would think up, hoping to help their young, distraught colleague tempt her finicky baby. Nothing worked.

Pat, trying to get Kelly to eat while Bun makes homemade formula. (He looks a lot calmer than Bun). Mom's cousin's wife, Lil, stands by for emotional support.

We lived in Pullman, Washington, which is situated among the steep, rolling wheat fields of the Palouse. The Palouse is acclaimed worldwide for its unusual beauty, but no one ever mentions the winters. My first winter in the Palouse had barely begun when our small apartment’s only bedroom roof caved in from the weight of the first big snow. The landlord wouldn’t fix the roof, and my parents couldn’t afford to move, so they just shut the door and let the bedroom fill with snow. Somehow, we limped to the end of the semester, huddled together in what remained of our caved-in apartment with Dad studying for finals, Mom frantically concocting new baby formulas, and me contributing non-stop background wails.

Salvation appeared in the unlikely form of my mom’s mother. Despite always having a rather contentious relationship with my mom in those days, when hearing of our plight, Grandma offered to take me in until Dad graduated from college in mid-June. Grandma and Grandpa Keough had just settled down and bought a home in Tacoma, WA. Back then, Tacoma was a tough, blue-collar, hard-drinking, chain-smoking kind of place that seemed like a mecca to my hard-drinking, chain-smoking/tobacco-chewing grandparents who had lived all over the remote wilds of northern Montana, Idaho, and Washington in Grandpa’s career as a railroad lineman. My parents could not afford a car, so Grandma used her free train pass to come pick me up before Christmas. Thus began my lifelong love of trains and, shortly thereafter, the second great love of my life—corn syrup.

Sugar Baby with Grandma on a camping trip. She doesn't look overly happy, but then again, it appears that she's been given a chicken leg, not anything containing sugar... yet anyway.

Once back home in Tacoma, Grandma quickly ascertained that indeed my rotten personality was merely because I was hungry, a character flaw I still exhibit on a regular basis when I miss a meal. Just to look at me, you would never guess I was malnourished, though. I still had the round face and chubby cheeks of a Gerber baby thanks to all my Irish peasant ancestors whose bodies had learned to cling onto any scrap of fat they could suck out of a potato. I carried all the fat from my entire body in my baby-face fat pouches like a hamster storing nuts. However, when you removed my multiple layers of swaddling, it was a different story. I was as scrawny as they come.

Grandma had been a short-order cook in various greasy-spoon cafes and logging camps along the north country railroad lines, and that woman knew how to cook. Like most short-order cooks, nutrition never entered her mind. Taste was everything. Out the window went all the complicated, nutritious homemade formulas my mom had labored over the hot stove all night cooking up for her wailing babe. Grandma grabbed a can of evaporated milk off the shelf, diluted it by half with Karo syrup, and threw in a can of condensed milk for good measure because I probably looked like a kid who needed an extra dose of milk, and what could be better than condensing it?

When this magic formula hit my lips, I was transformed. No more screaming, bad baby persona for me as I spent the next 6 months in a blissful sugar coma sucking on my corn syrup bottles until Dad graduated in June, and my parents came to pick up their happy, little butterball.

And I never looked back. As our fortunes improved, Mom would make her gourmet huckleberry sourdough pancakes with real maple syrup for breakfast. You could always tell where I sat at the family table because there was my trusty bottle of Karo Syrup® waiting for me to drench Mom’s delicious pancakes. Everyone would look at me with scorn. I didn’t care. I was in my happy place. 

For a while, my nutrition-minded-before-it-was-cool family humored my addiction. My favorite frosting for my birthday cake was some concoction that involved Mom boiling and whipping corn syrup for hours into a marshmallow fluff. During his gold panning phase, if Dad wanted to bribe me to keep panning for gold up some creek in the middle of nowhere, all he had to say was, “Hey Kel, I’ll buy you a Big Hunk® on the way home if you find some gold.” And I’d pan my little heart out for hours. I never found any, but I always got my Big Hunk® anyway as a reward for effort. When we made s’mores over campfires at night, all I cared about was the burnt marshmallow part—the rest diluted my sugar hit. It was a glorious time for a corn syrup addict.

Unfortunately, my days of sugar bliss came to an abrupt end the first time I went to a dentist. Mom and Dad had always been annoyingly consistent about making us brush our teeth, but even regular brushing could not compete with my addiction. Not to mention I was known to just wet my toothbrush and put it back when Mom and Dad were too busy to personally supervise. After spending numerous torture sessions getting cavities filled in most of my baby teeth by a maniacal dentist who propped my mouth open with a big rubber ball probably belonging to his cocker spaniel, even I was forced to concede that maybe I did have a teeny problem with corn syrup after all. (And for the record, I technically only bit him hard twice no matter what he told my poor mom, who was already mortified by the state of my teeth.) 

And while my love of corn syrup has never abated, I have been forced over the years to moderate my consumption. For a time, Mom enforced a total sugar ban in our home, but that didn’t last long because Dad had a sweet tooth, too.  Slowly, sugar began to creep back into our diet thanks to Dad. He began to treat us girls to a tiny Ice Cube® chocolate square when we accompanied him on the walk downtown to the newsstand. It wasn’t much, but it gave me hope for the future. Then of course, Dad believed it was unthinkable to go camping and not toast marshmallows. That was a big win for me! And when all my adult teeth thankfully grew in without being covered in decay, and they finally got my dental bill paid off, Mom relaxed a little.  She was an excellent baker, so gradually more sugary treats began to appear, although it was still a rare treat. One day, I even found a bottle of my beloved Karo® in the kitchen cupboard!

As an adult, I’ve kept my corn syrup addiction pretty much under control, but I confess I’ve had a few relapses. When a $1500 crown attached itself to the last Big Hunk® bar I ate, that was kind of a wake-up call for me, and I decided I was only going to go for the pure stuff from then on. I still keep a bottle of Karo® in my cupboard no matter what the naysayers say. And a couple of times a year, I take out my trusty bottle of corn syrup and, in a salute to my grandma who took me in during my hour of need, I drench a couple of pieces of French toast with it. And it is still glorious. And although I can only indulge my addiction when alone to spare myself the gasps of horror, in my heart of hearts I know I will always be Grandma’s sugar baby.