Before I started writing this, I consulted a longtime acquaintance who’s also an SEO expert. I wasn’t trying to trick people into reading this story. I just didn’t want to give people the wrong idea. Mostly, I was worried about a specific word in the name of a product that I wanted to look into. What would happen if I put that word in a headline? Would I get blocked if I used it over and over in the story?

My guy, David Zimmerman, said not to worry. “As far as SEO goes, I wouldn't be concerned,” he told me. “You'll never rank for [that word] no matter what you do because you're fighting years of spammers.”

So, with that out of the way, I would like to show you a picture that several of you sent me a while ago, you freaks:

Before we go on, let’s establish some ground rules. First, despite the name of the potato chips shown above, this story is going to be non-sexual. It’s somehow safe for work! Sure, we’re going to talk about stuff like slang and the idea of vulgarity and human nature and stuff. But if you got here because you searched for something naughty on the internet, you are going to be very disappointed, much like the folks who Googled some overtly porny terms and ended up at another story I wrote. My apologies.

Also! I do understand that AI could conjure up an image like this in a split second. But I’ve checked, and this is a very real potato chip bag. It’s on the wall in a small town museum and everything. They’re kinda proud of it!

What’s less clear is the story of the man depicted on the bag. If you check on the internet every time this picture pops up, you’ll get a simple story that sounds fairly authoritative, but has been pretty hard to fact check. Plus, if you ask around town (which I did), you’ll get different stories that don’t seem to line up. Big Tit is a bit of an enigma.

But beyond that, I had a more existential question. If someone wanted to bestow the name Big Tit on you in the present day, you may not be happy about it (unless, of course, you were in a specific line of work, in which case, you do you!). But here, we’re talking about a man who lived a century ago. Did he and others know what they were doing?

I originally came across the picture of the potato chip bag more than a year ago. I made calls. I talked to people who gave me conflicting information. I dove into archives. I spoke to linguists. And finally, this week, I connected with the only person left who personally knew the man whose ill-fated venture created an internet meme and a quirky point of pride for a small town.

So now, at long last, here is the true story of Big Tit.

All of the swirling stories and internet posts out there about the potato chips seem to have one thing in common: The guy who made them had the last name Tart, and he lived in Dunn, North Carolina. Here’s the problem, though: There are a lot of Tarts in Dunn. There’s a Tart Road. A Tart Memorial Park. A real estate firm named Tart & Tart. There’s Tart’s Strawberry and Produce Farm. A search through an old Dunn phone book brings up more than 100 people named Tart in a town with a population around 8,000. They’re everywhere.

All Tarts, however, are not created equal. Some of them became very prominent citizens in Dunn. Others did not. “I always tell people: There’s the rich tarts, the medium-rich Tarts, and us, the poor Tarts,” said one Tart I talked to by phone. “I don’t even have a potato chip bag,” he added. “I wish I did.”

That particular Tart had heard that Big Tit had a son named Tittle, who was a Mason, a Shriner, and the last surviving member of the Dunn Clowns, meaning he occasionally wore a fez and drove a tiny car in parades. Tittle was indeed a real person, but he went by a different nickname, Slim, and he was not Big Tit’s son. Also, all of the Tarts in Dunn seem to have nicknames. This, too, complicated things.

Nobody with the name Tit is mentioned in any books about Dunn. I asked the folks who run a local history Facebook page if they’d post a picture and ask people what they knew, but they declined. An administrator said he’s tired of the Beavis and Butthead genre of reactions they get every time the picture shows up.

The dozens of Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit posts about the potato chips all tell the same basic story: That the bag was from the 1930s, and that Big Tit was the nickname of a guy named Titus Tart. When I called up the Dunn Area History Museum, which has an original wax potato chip bag up on the wall, they told me the same thing. Problem is, there doesn’t seem to have been a Titus Tart who ever lived in Dunn. My searches of archives, old newspapers, yearbooks, and census records all came up empty.

The folks at the museum gave me a few more Tarts to contact. I called several of them and, after introducing myself as a grown man who writes a newsletter called the North Carolina Rabbit Hole, proceeded to ask them if they knew anything about Big Tit. I felt awkward, but every Tart I talked to did not seem to think that the name was cringeworthy. One of them, Lee Tart, responded to my question with “Hell yeah, Big Tit!” and told me that he had a potato chip bag hanging on the wall of his home.

Lee confirmed that Big Tit was actually Lofton Arthur Tart Jr., who was born in 1910, died in 1967, and has the nickname Tit on his grave marker. Past that, Lee didn’t know much. But he said his father, Clarence Lee Tart Jr. (whose nickname is Bozie), might be the only person still alive who might know more.

All of this, by the way, happened in March of 2025. Back then, Lee told me he’d get in touch with Bozie who was in his 90s, but the connection never happened. Lee stopped replying to my texts, and the trail went cold.

In the meantime, I pursued another burning question: Did this man know what his nickname actually meant?

For that, I consulted linguists. One, a man named Colin Gorrie who writes a newsletter called the Dead Language Society, told me that the word “tit” is an Old English word, and its meaning hasn’t changed all that much. The word “teat” may have come from it. “But your question about how off-colour it would have seemed in the 1940s is an interesting one. From all I can find, ‘tit’ was originally fairly neutral, but became seen as slang in the mid-19th century. So I think it's likely that it would have been cause for raised eyebrows in the 1940s.”

Another linguistic anthropologist with experience researching and analyzing slang said roughly the same thing. “I think vulgarity points to extreme feelings,” Honey Hyman-Dworsky told me in a message. “In the 1940s, tit was vulgar but the degree of obscenity is only to the same degree that breasts are taboo. Like, an excess of awareness about breasts would correlate with how vulgar the word would be. For example, during feminist awareness in the late 20th century around the accessibility of breastfeeding in public, there was a conservative reactivity which made breasts super duper important and also super duper obscene. It’s why many millennials find the word particularly atrocious.”

Hyman-Dworsky said that Big Tits Potato Chips would not have flown as a national brand in the 1930s or 1940s because, well, people would probably have had the same initial reaction that you did when you saw the bag. But in Dunn, the nickname and the brand name both could have worked because, well, everybody knew who the proprietor was. “Names like ‘Tit’ and ‘Dick’ are both around because people can withstand that kind of scrutiny,” Hyman-Dworsky wrote. “If Big Tit was out here with a company named after him, I’d guess that they were either small for their own community, or white where the family can enjoy the benefit of being taken seriously even if someone’s out here named after a boob, lol.”

So, yes, it seems as if this man would certainly have known that his nickname was slang for a part of the female anatomy. It also seems like nobody in town really cared all that much or found it to be vulgar, as evidenced by the fact that they printed his nickname in the local newspaper and were okay with him naming a potato chip venture after it.

But that was all an educated guess. Facts-wise, all I had were some newspaper clippings from what amounts to the 1950s version of a gossip column. I needed first-hand information. So this week, I texted Lee Tart one more time. He got back to me right away. Bozie had been hesitant to talk before, he said, and he’d been working through some deaths in the family. But finally, he was ready to tell me what he knew about Big Tit.

Bozie Tart is 92 years old, and other than a stint in the Army that took him to Panama and some time away at UNC-Chapel Hill, he’s lived in Dunn his entire life. He loved working at the family lumber mill until he sold it in in 1972, and he’s been in real estate ever since. He’s one of the Tarts in Tart & Tart Inc.

Bozie’s grandfather was Lofton A. Tart, a farmer who opened that lumber mill, and later ran a bank and became a county commissioner. He was so prominent that the Raleigh News & Observer named him as a Tar Heel of the Week in 1954.

Tit was Bozie’s uncle. For decades, he ran a fuel oil company on North McKay Street in Dunn, one with a shiny red showroom floor and a prominent aquarium full of fish, plants, and snails. But Tit was different than his father, Lofton. “He was not in the same tradition as my granddaddy, who was a very successful banker and farmer,” Bozie told me. Over the course of our conversation, Bozie said the family loved Tit, but that he marched to a different tune. “He was just different,” he said.

Tit never married. “He was kind of a bachelor playboy in a way,” Bozie said. “He was known to have a girlfriend all the time. Story is that he carried a diamond ring around in his automobile and he connected with some girl somewhere and gave her that ring. And he had to take it back.” That story is backed up by a newspaper story that said, in 1957, that he was “considering matrimony” with a girl from Salemburg. “Tit has that romantic look in his eyes,” the story read.

Also, about that automobile. Tit’s Cadillac was the biggest car in town, one that was meant to hold seven people but had room for nine. “His automobiles were limousines. He didn’t buy standard cars,” Bozie said. “He didn’t have a chauffeur. He drove it himself.”

Getting in and out of the car was a whole production. For one thing, Big Tit was, actually, big. A draft card from 1940, when he was 30 years old, lists him as being 6’1” and weighing 240 pounds. An injury later made moving harder for him. Bozie said Tit once fell off a platform at his oil company and broke his neck. “He always had a real stiff neck. From the waist up couldn’t hardly move, but he could walk,” he said. “You’d see him in that limousine. He’d get out of it, and it was all he could do to move around.” The cartoon image from the front of the potato chip bag, depicting a large man with a cane, was accurate.

By most accounts, Tit’s company was successful, and the local paper once called him a “prominent Dunn business mind.” Behind the scenes, though, things were more chaotic. “My dad was Big Tit’s brother. But my dad had to bail him out of two or three ventures. He was pretty fed up with him,” Bozie said. “One time, there was about a $15,000 claim against his oil company because he was a playboy, and he ran through a lot of money and he didn’t pay for the products. They were going to sue him.

“It was hard on my dad. He was successful, but he didn’t have that kind of money. Being his brother, he had to help him out. It was hard to control Tit.”

One of those ventures that didn’t work out? The potato chip company. In the 1930s, chips were a fairly new product. They’d been around since the mid 19th century. The story goes that in 1853, Cornelius Vanderbilt was unhappy with the thickness of some fried potatoes he ordered at a restaurant in Saratoga, New York. He sent them back. The chef made some thinner potato slices, fried them, and sent them back out as a prank. Vanderbilt loved them, and the chips became a hit. They became a marketable product once someone figured out that they’d keep and travel better in a wax paper bag.

Big Tit got in on the action as a side hustle, but it didn’t last. “They didn’t go over real big,” Bozie said of the potato chips. “It was just something he did on the side. I’m kinda in the dark about how successful it was. I don’t think it generated much income.”

Past that, Bozie told me he doesn’t know much more. He doesn’t know how Big Tit got his nickname, only that he usually just called him Tit. I asked him if it was short for Titus, and Bozie said he didn’t think so. Nobody had ever called him by that name. He didn’t know much else about his personal life. While a bunch of other Tarts joined the family businesses—the lumber yard, the bank, the farm, and later, the real estate company—Tit went his own way. He wasn’t ostracized. Nobody held it against him. He didn’t have a bad reputation. “He was just a playboy,” Bozie says. “I think if he hadn’t been a playboy, he would have done alright.”

Of course, all of this stuff is now way in the past. Lofton A. Tart Jr. died from a blood clot in 1967. He was 56 years old. His oil company is long gone. His family name carries on, but there are a lot of Tarts. He has no descendants. His brother, Bozie’s father, has a park named in his honor. There isn’t any landmark that honors Big Tit.

And yet, somehow, a failed business venture created a few cherished and sought-after mementos that the internet gets a good chuckle out of from time to time. If you live in Dunn and you’re lucky enough, you might have a bag of Big Tits Potato Chips on your wall. Each wax paper totem that’s left is a small nod to a small-town guy who lived large and whose nickname gave him a long life after death. Past that, there’s not much else to say. After all, says Bozie: “He was just an uncle.”