Somewhere around here I have a copy of Ray Broekel's The Great American Candy Bar Book, published in 1982. This is a magnificent history of candy bars, but aside from that, two other things make that book unique: first, Broekel is not only the author of the best history of candy bars ever, he's also the only known candy bar historian in the world, period. And second, at the very time Ray Broekel was on a book tour sponsored by the National Confectioners Association, the book went out of print.
Steve Almond, author of Candy Freak, asked Broekel "Why did you think the book didn't sell?"
Broekel's reply: "People didn't buy it."
Today that book is so rare that if you want a brand new copy, it will set you back $225.00 on Amazon. But strangely enough, you can still find used copies on Bookfinder.com as low as $8.29 in very good condition. So go figure.
In some ways Steve Almond's more recent book, Candy Freak, is a better read than Broekel's, not least because Almond interviewed Broekel and learned things I don't recall seeing in Broekel's book. (I haven't seen my copy of The Great American Candy Bar Book in years; it's boxed up somewhere in storage.) Almond reports that Broekel's favorite candy bar is something called the "Dream Bar." What candy bar does Broekel consider the most interesting? "Vegetable Sandwich," a bar introduced in the 1920's and long extinct. As Steve Almond reports:
"The wrapper showed a bright medley of veggies -celery, peas, carrots, cabbage. The legend read: A DELICIOUS CANDY MADE WITH VEGETABLES. Dehydrated vegetables, to be exact, covered in chocolate. There is no need to comment on the wrongness of this product, though I feel duty bound to report that one of the manufacturer's taglines was WILL NOT CONSTIPATE. Yummy."
Even though Ray Broekel's history of candy bars failed to ignite, he was undaunted. Three years later he followed that book up with The Chocolate Chronicles. That one sold better, probably because it had the word "chocolate" in the title. Chocolate sells, even if only in print. Here is Steve Almond again:
"Reading over Chronicles, one is struck by the strange, incatatory poetry of the brand names: Love Nest, Smile-a-While, Alabama Hot Cakes, Old King Tut, Gold Brick, Prairie Schooner, Subway Sadie, Oh Mabel!, Choice Bits, Long Distance, Big Alarm, That's Mine, Smooth Sailin, Red Top, It's Spiffy, Daylight, Moonlight, Top Star, Heavenly Hash, Cherry Hits, Cheer Leader, Hollywood Stars, Strawberry Shortcake, Ping, Tingle, Polar Bar, North Pole, Sno King, Mallow Puff, B'Gosh, Dixie, Whiz, Snooze, Big Chief, Fire Chief, Wampum, Jolly Jack, Candy Dogs, Graham Lunch, Tween Meals, Hippo Bar, Old Hickory, Rough Rider, Bonanza!"Almond notes that he is only skimming the surface here, as just one company alone, the Sperry Candy Company of Milwaukee, (which was by no means a huge corporation), turned out the following bars between 1925 and 1965:
"Chicken Dinner, Fat Emma, Straight Eight, Pair o Kings, White Swan, Prom Queen, Cold Turkey, Chicken Spanish, Denver Sandwich, Coco-Mallow, Coco Fudge, Big Shot, Cherry Delight, Hot Fudge-Nut, Almond Freeze, Mint Glow, Koko Krunch, and Ripple."
-Excerpted from Candy Freak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, by Steve Almond.
Naturally I'm not going to begin to name anywhere close to the 100,000 different candy bars that came and went since the 1920's, and neither is Steve Almond. But Ray Broekel has filing cabinets brimming with candy wrappers from pretty much all of them. And here's the irony: even if you had lived back in the days when all these candy bars existed, you would never have heard of most of them. That's because Milton Hershey was pretty much the only candymaker who established a national brand for his Hershey Bar. Most candymakers were small businesses that never expanded outside the towns and cities where their candy was made. That means distribution was limited to local stores within the same area the candy was manufactured. If you lived in Boston, you might have had access to the many candy bars manufactured in Boston, but no one in, say, Pennsylvania would have ever seen or tasted a candy bar made in your town. And vice versa. Candy bars made in New York City, or Cleveland, or Chattanooga would have seen no distribution outside the those greater metropolitan areas. Candy just didn't travel far in those days, and unless you were a salesman who traveled all over the country, you just didn't see that much variety as far as candy bars went.
But here's the odd reality: because of modern distribution methods, you actually have access to a greater variety of candy bars today than you ever would have had in any other time.
The ingredients of most of these bars are lost to time, but we can assume there was a lot of duplication -very similar bars virtually identical to one another, although some might have tasted better than others. There's a lot you can do with chocolate, nougat, caramel, and peanuts, and countless variations are possible, but there's also only so much you can do with chocolate, nougat, caramel, and peanuts. So there may have been 100,000 candy bars with different names, but probably not 100,000 candy bars uniquely different from one another. My guess is quite a few of them would have been hard to tell apart once the wrappers were removed.
Still, a few classic oldtimers still exist, pretty much in their original form, such as 5th Avenue, Charleston Chews, Big Hunk, Abba Zabba, Tootsie Rolls, and many others. The small Pennsylvania candy company founded by David Goldenberg is still grinding out its one and only product, Peanut Chews, and it's still a family buisness run by Goldenberg's descendants. Peanut Chews just turned 100 in 2017. Necco wafers, a candy favored by soldiers in the civil war, has been around since 1847.
The Sperry Candy Company went out of business by 1965, but the Fat Emma had already been copied by Frank Mars and given new life as the Milky Way. Some candy bars have disappeared for good, but others, happily, have been reborn. When I was a kid and all candy bars cost a nickel, one incredibly delicious candy bar suddenly arrived at Palm Pharmacy just a few doors from my house. That candy bar was called Premium, and when you unwrapped it, it had two sections so you could snap it in half lengthwise. The bad news was that the Premium bar cost a whole ten cents, twice as much as every other candy bar in existence. That was a lot of money in 1960 for a kid who only got an allowance of a quarter a week. If I bought a Premium bar, that meant I only had enough left over for one regular candy bar and one comic book. Dilemma.
Still, nothing in the world had the taste and texture of a Premium bar, so I would often find myself paying that exhorbitant price, even if I had to kipe a dime now and then from my mom's purse. Then, without warning, suddenly the Premium Bar disappeared from store shelves. It was at least two decades before I saw one again. That was the day I discovered the exact same candy bar had shown up on the candy aisle with a completely different name: Kit Kat.
Between Kit Kat and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, I now had everything I would ever need out of life. And then came the Marathon Bar. Oh...My...GOODNESS! The Marathon Bar soon became my favorite candy bar of all time.
Let us now bow our heads and mourn the sad passing of the Marathon Bar. Mars began producing them in 1973 and by 1974 I was eating a Marathon bar every day. And then, a mere eight years after it debuted, Marathon quietly disappeared forever. Some nights I can still be heard crying myself to sleep.