Years later, candy’s still dandy

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
9 July 2005
By Lenore Skenazy

Let’s think about something happy for a change. Let’s think about Lick-A-Maid.
And Smarties. And candy necklaces. And how about those tiny wax soda bottles? You’d bite the top off and go wild - or as wild as you could get drinking half a teaspoon of colored sugar water. Still, that sip was as intoxicating as champagne.

In the past two weeks that my son has become addicted to Bubble Tape, I have been thinking about how 40 summers from now someone will hand him a foot of sour apple Bubble Tape and he’ll be instantly transported back to the summer when he was 7. Just like one whiff of wax lips takes me back.

Wax lips. My 10-year-old sister would buy them at the little store we went to on summer vacation and I, five years younger, would marvel at her gourmet sophistication. Why, she was spending her money on a candy you couldn’t even SWALLOW! It was like she was a wine taster or something: she’d chew the wax till it lost its taste, then spit it out as I watched, awestruck. Me, I was just a piker with Pixie Stix - straws filled with tasty sugar you’d pour on your tongue until the straw got so soggy no more would pour out. Of course, by that time your tongue was raw as sandpaper, so who cared?

Memories like these are why nostalgia candy is becoming big business, says Susan Fussell, spokeswoman at the National Confectioners Association. More and more specialty stores and Web sites are popping up to cater to boomers eager for a cheap and tasty trip to the past. Some customers buy the candy for reunions. Others use it as a way to broach the olden days without boring their kids. What child is going to refuse a bubble gum cigar? Or even, politically incorrect though it is, a candy cigarette?

Why are they so popular?

“It’s not something you’re going to find at Wal-Mart,” he says.

It’s not something you’d WANT to find, says Jerry Cohen, owner of Economy Candy on the lower East Side. This is the granddaddy of nostalgia candy stores simply because it never stopped selling the delights it sold when it opened in 1937. “I used to use candy cigarettes to draw on the sidewalk,” Cohen recalls. Certainly beat eating them.

He has much fonder memories of the jawbreakers and Mary Janes of his youth. And especially of the Lick-A-Maid: “We had filthy hands, but we would put our finger in there. We all grew up normal, nothing ever happened to us.”

And that is pretty much the big lesson everyone stumbles upon as they review their candy pasts: Turkish Taffy never DID take out a filling. Frozen Charleston Chews never quite broke anyone’s jaw. Swallowing a whole handful of Gold Rocks Nugget chewing gum didn’t result in a single recorded fatality.

So if you’re feeling a little down or insecure, the way many of us are at present, maybe it’s time for a faith-affirming spearmint leaf or candy button (paper included). Or even a few inches of Bubble Tape shared with someone you love.

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