When I was ten years old, I was filled with delicious anticipation whenever I took a little spin on my bike to the 7-11. The pockets of my camp pants would be heavily weighted down change that I had scrounged around for. It was amazing how careless adults were with their money! Pennies, Nickels, dimes, and an occasional Quarter or two were everywhere in our house. In junk drawers, under cushions, in little knick-knack dishes, and old beer steins. Once I was satisfied that I had found all the dough I could, I was off to purchase as much candy as my newly found treasure would buy. But, it could not be just any candy. It had to be a carefully chosen mix of good candy that also offered a high return on investment. My profit was sweetness and the goal was to buy an assortment that would last a very long time. It was the 1970s, and the candy racks were filled with varieties that have mostly disappeared from the shelves today.
There was logic behind each selection I made. My pocket change would only go so far. I knew that to get my money's worth, I would have to purchase a certain amount of what the old folks called penny candy. These were more like nickel or dime candy in my day. My go-to for this category were called bb-bats! bb-bats were basically a kind of flavored taffy on a paper stick. They came in fruit flavors that had that off-kilter, uncanny, artificial taste to them. Banana was my favorite. Strawberry was a distant second. I would get about four or five of these and still have plenty of coins remaining.
Next, I had to decide what my major purchase would be. Which candy bar or two would I spend up to 35 cents on? This was a make or break decision. I could have gone for a classic like a Snickers, but that would be a mistake. It would be at the top end of the price range and it was shorter than some other bars to boot. My decision usually boiled down to this:
Choice A: I could go with a Marathon bar. It was 8 inches long! And we knew that because they printed a ruler right on the package. We had been taught in school that the metric system was coming to America any day then. So, the good folks at the Marathon bar company had included centimeters on the ruler as well. I now knew that 8 inches equaled twenty centimeters.
I believe that is the only metric conversion that I still know today.
Choice B: The less obvious, but equally compelling option of the enigmatic
Nestle's Choco-Lite bar. Was it a weird texture? Was there something a little off with the flavoring? The answer was yes, on both counts. It was described as being filled with crispy chips. I do not know what chips they are talking about. In my experience there was nothing but little air holes dispersed throughout the whole candy bar. The wrapper boasted that it would give me a special chocolaty feeling. Notice they said chocolaty, not chocolate. But, it had a couple of things going for it. First, it was usually priced a bit lower than the other bars. And second, I have to admit that there was something to that bit about a special chocolaty feeling. It seemed to make the sweetness linger a little longer on my tongue.
Usually, I had enough to purchase both bars, as long as I bypassed some of the other similarly priced non-bar candy. So, my other option might be to get the Marathon bar. It would take a long time to chew through 8 inches of the chocolate coated and extra-chewy caramel filling. Instead of the chocolaty air-hole bar, I could go with something much more sugary. I often went for the Fun Dip. Whoever invented this was a genius! It was basically a laminated foil pouch filled with flavored sugar crystals. The brilliance was in the method that the good folks at fun dip invented for eating the sugary powder. In a separate compartment in the pouch was a little stick made of compressed sugar. So, you would lick the sweet stick to wet it with your saliva, and then dip the sticky-stick into the flavored sugar. It was like magic the way the colorful sugar crystals would then cling to the stick. Then you return the coated, sugary utensil back to your mouth to suck the flavored crystal right off of it. This process was then repeated over and over until all the fun dip was gone. You had no choice at this point then but to finish off the much diminished stick.
There were other choices that could be made. Some of my other options included a candy that offered more than just a sweet flavor. Zotz were little hard candies with a wicked surprise. Soon after you popped it in your mouth, you would feel a little bit of some fizzy, sweet and sour, substance begin to leak from inside the hard shell. Not long after that, the candy shell would give way to a complete release of its fizzy center. It virtually exploded in your mouth, and soon you would feel like a rabid dog foaming at the mouth. Everyone raves about Pop-Rocks, but they had nothing on Zotz.
Some others that might make it in my mix were candies like Now & Laters, which we called something that sounded like Ni-ar-laters. They were basically little, sour blocks of taffy. I also enjoyed Sugar Daddy's. Not the most politically sensitive name for a candy. Speaking of politically incorrect, I occasionally bought candy cigarettes. They were a clear attempt to normalize smoking, but back then I just thought they made me look cool. They tasted like sweet chalk, but flavor was not really the point.
The candy that disappointed me the most were called Bottle Caps. They were shaped like the caps on soda bottles. They were supposed to have soda flavorings. They were flavors like cola or root beer, and orange or grape soda. They tasted awful. It was a great concept, but can you imagine if they had done this right? What if they had combined efforts with one of the major soda makers. You could have had more genuine flavors. They could have capitalized on the name recognition of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola. A real missed opportunity.
These days I can not eat candy in the kind of quantities I did as a kid. I believe it would be the end of me if I did.
Check out Marathon bar commercial here.
No comments:
Post a Comment