When I would visit my grandparents on my mother’s side, I would often get a treat. I think it is a universal thing to deny your own kids sugary snacks. Grandparents are allowed to offer bribes more readily. It is part of the contract. As a kid, if we wanted to have candy, we had to earn it, which was half the fun.
One of our favorite summertime activities was to grab our RED FLYER wagon, some boxes and two friends and scoure the streets and alleys for pop bottles. The loose collection of glass bottles would tinkle and clink as we pulled the wagon over rough surfaces. The pop bottles had a 2 cent deposit and the quart-sized bottles brought a nickel at Joe’s Grocery. He would add up the value and then ask if we wanted to have coins or buy candy.
Joe and his wife owned the grocery with a 25 foot store front. It was old with tin squares on the ceiling, hard wood floors that creaked and never quite looked clean. We were boys… who cared? The point was that Joe had the best selection of candy in Lafayette. He kept it on shelves low enough for kids to see everything, nothing was behind glass. You could look all you wanted, but you had to ask politely for Joe to pick it up for you.
We had marvelous treats to choose from. We had the same candy bars available today. Stores place in them checkout lines deliberately to provoke whiny children to beg, plead and cry for. In addition to candy bars of enormous portions, we had treats beyond imagination. We would spend 15 minutes debating the value of various candies. Joe would patiently wait for us to decide how best to spend our earnings. He must have really liked kids to be that tolerant.
We ogled Cinnamon Stix; wax candy with syrupy Kool-Aid trapped inside different shapes like mini pop bottles, wax lips, round wax balls; ribbon hard candy was formed like a flat squiggle; tri-colored taffy that was rolled out in thin 3 inch wide sheets 12 inches long and sealed in an almost transparent wax paper; jaw breakers; clove-flavored chewing gum sticks; toothpicks in tiny glass bottles containing spicy cinnamon solution; Red Hots, the kind we use now for cake decorating; button candy — candy dots stuck to a ribbon of paper to resemble polka-dot dress fabric; paper straws with sour powdered stuff like Kool-Aid; Bazooka bubble gum in twisted wax paper, the inside of the paper had a random cartoon featuring Bazooka Joe, a kid with a black eye patch and a baseball cap; red and black licorice in any size and shape; there was a round black licorice with a white center; small bags of shredded chewing gum that was supposed to mimic adult chewing tobacco; yep, we had boxes that mimicked cigarettes, each white candy cigarette was tinted red at the burning tip and tasted suspiciously like peppermint; little draw-string bags that resembled a miner’s gold pouch, the candy inside the bag looked like gold nougats; giant peppermint sticks with red stripes, 1 inch around and 8 inches long; lollypops with white paper loops to hold on to; bubble pops; tootsie pops of every flavor; tootsie rolls; gum with trading cards of sports heroes. Joe’s Grocery was nothing less than a sugary adventure. We would return home pulling our RED FLYER and a paper bag full of treasure.
