Candy Companies Seek New Outlets to Sell Their Sweets

There were a lot of places in the old neighborhood where you could get a fix. If you took the shortcut through the alley to Park Avenue, you'd run into two of the places: little shops on the corner that we used to call confectioneries. They were sort of the forerunners of the modern-day convenience store. Very few staples like eggs, meat, and vegetables were sold there, but if you wanted a sugar fix, they were the place to go: soda, chocolate milk, candy bars of every description, and a big bin of penny candy. A better description would be "loose candy" because even way back then about the only candy that cost a penny was the Tootsie Roll.

For an even greater selection, you hopped on the bus and took it for a thirty-minute ride down to Cherokee Street. There, in about a four square block area, you could find a couple of five-and-dimes and an old-fashioned drug store. There was the Woolworth's on the corner, a Kresgie's further on up the street, and a Globe Drugstore on the far corner about a block away. The five-and-dimes had a huge collection of candy that you never heard of that was really cheap, and the drugstore specialized in large quantities of merchandise that was "railroad salvage." I guess that meant that it had fallen off of a train somewhere. If you felt really ambitious and had a little extra money, you could stay on the bus and ride it all the way downtown to the big Woolworth's. This one contained a lunch counter and several bins of heated cashews, peanuts, and other assorted nuts. This was also the location of my first, and probably only, act of civil disobedience. There was a story in the newspaper at the time about a woman who was arrested for eating a handful of the roasted cashews on the bus. I thought that this was really silly, so for several years whenever I rode the bus downtown, I defiantly munched on a handful of cashews right after I got on the bus. Fortunately, I was never arrested.