Candy! Ben Franklin, Five and Dime

Living so close to downtown Shelby Ohio I took every opportunity to spend what little money I had on CANDY - an important staple of a growing child's diet.

My favorite childhood candies were the NECCO wafers - the black licorice ones were the best and quickly turned your entire mouth BLACK.

Other pure-sugar-goodies high on my want-list included Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip. This is a packet of flavored sugars in different compartments. You take the pure, hardened stick of sugar, lick it, and stick it down into the fine-grained sugars, pull out with the sugar-covered-sugar-stick, and lick it! PURE SUGAR EXCITEMENT!


For more substantial "food candy" I'd often choose the wonderfully peanut-buttery-coconut-crunchy Zagnut candybar. Mmmm... If I didn't have enough for the Zagnut I'd get the cheaper Chick-O-Stick which was the same thing only in stick form and, no doubt, made by a different candy company.


Oh, and another all-time favorite candy were the Bottle Caps candy. The candies were round, and ridged at at the edges, looking like real bottle caps but they came in various flavors like Cola, Root beer, Cherry, and Lemon-Lime. So tasty!


Another good, cheap sugar fix was achieved by the Jaw Breakers - which would last a good 30 minutes, depending on their size, and could shatter your teeth into shards if attempting to chew them. And they were cheap too, maybe 2 or 5 cents each. Other cheap candies found at the check out counters were the yummy Root Beer Barrels, mini Tootsie Rolls, Smarties, and those WONDERFUL Red Hot Atomic Fire Balls - which were sweet cinnamon jawbreakers which would nearly literally set your mouth on fire! You could buy them buy the box but also individually wrapped.


Other goodies included the ZOTS, which had a sour explosion in their centers, Pixie Stix, Pop Rocks - which mythically killed Mikey (photo), the Life Cereal kid from the 1972 commercial where Mikey's brothers test the cereal on their little brother and then exclaim, "He likes it! Hey Mikey!" (see YouTube video of the commercial HERE) by mixing Pop Rocks with Coca Cola, Sweetarts and Spree, and of course those syrup filled wax bottles and big wax lips for a laugh. I usually went in for the sugar candies as opposed to the candy bars. Candy bars and M&Ms (peanut) were preferred by many but they were more expensive too, always at least 25 cents and a little kid isn't usually carrying around that kind of loot - in the early 1970s!

You could get candy in a number of places but the best were Main Street's Ben Franklin store, down the hill a little at the Five and Dime, and just a little further down at Stevenson's Pharmacy and soda shoppe.

Ben Franklin, a small town, midwestern chain of stores which carried a little of everything - like of like an Old Time, small-town version of Wal-Mart. The Ben Franklin Stores always had the best and largest selection so I did most of my "shopping" there. I'd carefully count my coins and then make the necessary calculations to see how much STUFF I could buy. There were rarely any lines at the cash register and if there was it'd give me more time to see how much change I'd be given back and buy the penny candy at the counter. YES, there REALLY WAS PENNY CANDY back then!

The Five and Dime I don't remember as well as, I believe, Ben Franklin finally put them out of business with competition, but they were good too.

Stevenson's Pharmacy was a fantastic place "back-in-the-day". Not only was it a pharmacy but they also sold a large variety of greeting cards, a good selection of candy, and even had a real life Soda Fountain with spinning stools at its counter, serving not only milk shakes but also ice cream and root beer floats. Mmmm... They finally went out of business too but don't recall why. Possibly due to the competition of the Struble Drug Store across the street - where I got my FIRST JOB as a 14-year old (or 15). Man, I hated that job and the boss/pharmacist certainly didn't go out of his way to make life easy for me - just the opposite. But maybe it was because I was just a kid and not used to standing on my feet for hours or taking orders from a grouch with more four-letter-words in his vocabulary than I had. But again, I was young and since have met hundreds of these kinds of people. I think I lasted 5 or 6 months at that job, often getting to work by bicycle after school or on the weekends. Sometimes Mom would drop me off and I'd walk home, exhausted, afterwards. But maybe all this is better left for a later posting.

Check out a FANtastic website about historical American candies and their wrappers at http://www.candywrappermuseum.com/ . Another good one is at http://www.oldtimecandy.com/ - "Candy You Ate as a Kid".

Kindercamp and my first girlfriend

My first foray into the educational system - if you can call it that - was when I was, what, 4 years old (about 1969 or 1970) when I started going to Kindercamp, as it was called.

Kindercamp comes BEFORE kindergarden and is more of a daycare than actual education. I wonder if my parents paid something for that. It was housed downtown in the basement of the church behind the Shelby Post Office (yes, there's only one Post Office in Shelby) which was just down the backstreet from the Marvin Memorial Library and next door to the ice cream Drive In. They had/have a cool drive-through window, something unusual for those times. The drive in's name escapes me now but these years it has a kind of 1950s theme to it.

Shelby Post Office on North Gamble Street, corner of Whitney Avenue, Shelby Ohio

Mom would drive me every morning to kindercamp. While it was housed in the basement of the church (see building at far right edge of above photo) it was not a religious center of any kind. Seemed pretty normal to me. We had story time where we would grab our piece of carpet and lie down on the floor while listening to the woman reading a book about a dog or cat or both. I don't recall falling asleep during the reading but no doubt it happened.

And they had the best toys there. What's NOT great about spending 4 hours in a place when all these thousands of toys are new to you, you get to paint and paste and make macaroni "portraits", and also hold hands with the cute girls. I suppose some fights among the boys took place over WHO would get to play with the charp-edged metal plow toy but no one ever bothered or tested me.

I clearly remember my first day. I cried and cried, not wanting to go in, scared to death of this new and strange place. But after the first few minutes I was fine. And within a few days - or maybe weeks - I had my first ever girlfriend... errr.. girlfriendS - plural.

My first FIRST girlfriend's name was ANGIE. She was tall for her age too as I recall, and so very cute, black hair, beautiful smile. We never kissed, I don't think, but did look longingly into each others eyes and if you THINK you're boyfriend-girlfriend then heck, YOU ARE! In fact, we were boyfriend-girlfriend several times throughout the first few years of school but at that age its tough to be a one girl boy. hehehe...

Mom would pick me up at around noon and take me home or run errands. Funny, I don't remember HOW she came to get me but imagine she came on foot since we only lived about 8 or 10 blocks away - and since we only had one car and Dad took that to work. Surely we'd often go to Main Street's Ben Franklin store and 5 and Dime store to buy knitting supplies for her and a candy for me.

After our long walk home for my 2 little legs, Mom prepared a delicious lunch for me, with my best memories being of grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell's Soup, my favorite being the chicken noodle soup. But those grilled cheese sandwiches, using Velveeta Cheese (was it reallllly cheese???) were the best.