by Steve Almond
It should be clear, at this point, that I’m more or less out of my mind. But so are you. Because every one of you has some form of the Freak within you, has sought the succor of sweets in a moment of trauma, has attached some sacred set of memories to the small, attainable pleasures of candy. Because everyone, as a child, had the same basic wiring and that wiring ran directly from the id to the freak to the memory bank, because our most cogent memory triggers—our senses of smell and taste—are the ones most closely associated with the experience of the world in our mouths.
And this is why, when I bring up candy at a party or to a colleague or to the guy who comes to check the gas meter, there is this immediate outpouring of memories, confessions, opinions, regrets, which doesn’t happen when I bring up other hobbies of mine, such as bridge.
A few years ago, my friends began urging me to write a book about candy. Their reasoning ran as follows: Maybe if Steve writes about candy, he will shut up about candy. I didn’t listen to these suggestions, of course, because I’m fairly stubborn and because, at the time, I considered candy to be a subject unworthy of my artistic consideration, meaning that I might actually enjoy writing such a book and thus automatically violate the serious young writer’s credo: Suffer at all times, preferably in such a manner as to convey to the rest of the world just how much you’re suffering. So I went about my business of suffering, flamboyantly, with much deep-hearted kvetching to the proper maternal surrogates.
A couple of years ago, though, I was driving down Massachusetts Avenue and I noticed, for perhaps the 500th time, the giant chimney atop the New England Confectionery Company, which is painted in the style of a giant package of Necco wafers, and I thought of my dear old pop and his ancient Necco jones and, well, I didn’t do anything.
But then, a week later, I was driving through east Cambridge and I saw this run-down factory with a sign painted on the side that read SQUIRREL NUT BRAND. This was a terribly sad sight, because, though the place was all chipped brick and broken windows, the lettering itself was bright and hopeful. It reminded me of the giant red Schrafft’s sign that still lords over Charlestown and how, years ago, Schrafft’s had been the big kahuna of the boxed chocolates world, and how the sign is just a curiosity today, a little local color affixed to the top of a building filled with software companies. It began to dawn on me, in other words, that Boston, my adopted city, had something of an untold freak history.
When I called Squirrel Nut to find out what had happened, a friendly man named Bob Stengal answered the phone. He explained that he had been the general manager of Squirrel Nut Brands since 1970, but that he no longer served in that capacity because the company had been bought out and relocated to Texas, of all places, and though he wished the new owners the best of luck, you could tell that the whole scenario bummed him out.
The Squirrel Nut Zippers are perhaps best known these days as a band that played neoflapper music, music I spent several years trying quite hard (and never quite successfully) to enjoy. The original Squirrel Nut Zipper is a caramel nut chew, which has been in production since 1888. “We made one of the best taffies in the industry,” Bob told me. “It chewed beautifully. A good taffy should be soft enough to pull without snapping. Why, you could pull ours forever.”
I myself could attest to this. I had eaten several thousand Nut Zippers, because my optometrist stocked them in his candy bowl, meaning I ate twelve to fifteen during the course of an average visit, more if he had to replace my nose pads.
Before signing on with Squirrel Nut, Bob had been a shortening salesman, an occupation I hadn’t realized existed previous to our discussion, but which, nonetheless, lent him a rather intimate acquaintance with the city’s candyscape. Back in the fifties, he told me, four factories had operated near the old Coast Guard station, off Atlantic Avenue downtown—Royal, Cole, Haviland, and Liberty—pumping the smell of chocolate over the North End all day long. Main Street in Cambridge was known as Confectioner’s Row. The entire street was candy makers: James O. Welch (Junior Mints), Jack Smiley (hard candies), Graylock Confection (Tweet), Dagget (chocolates), Fox-Cross (Charleston Chew). One by one, these companies fell on hard times. The managers would call Stengal to discuss their problems. Should they sell out? Should they relocate? Pretty soon Squirrel Nut was the last independent, family-owned candy company in Boston.
I decided to visit Bob at his home, in Concord. He was a trim fellow, with neatly cropped white hair and a sweet, rabbity face. He showed me a bunch of memorabilia from his years with the company: awards, pictures of him with the owners, trade show programs going yellow at the edges. “I guess I was in denial right until they moved,” Bob said. “I didn’t empty my desk until two weeks before they shut the place down. By the end, I didn’t even have a desk. I was balancing a pad on my knee to take notes. They’d shut the utilities off, so it was dark. I remember I went up to the fourth floor of the factory and there was this echo. All the machines were gone. And I realized: this is just a shell now. Because, you know, when the factory was running, every floor had its own sounds. And when you were on the first floor, you could hear them all together, all those machines and people. It was like an orchestra.”
You don’t have to be a genius to see how a guy like Bob might shake me up. All that freak, all that loss.
But what I really needed was what little Charlie Bucket needed: to get myself inside a factory. I called over to Necco and got patched through to Walter Marshall, Vice President of Corporate Planning/Logistics, which translates as the Guy Who Has to Deal with All the Media Hassles, of whom I was hardly the most pressing. On the day I visited him, Marshall was anticipating a visit from Martha Stewart, the prescandal Martha, who wanted to talk with him about what had become Necco’s most popular product, the Conversation Heart.
These are the little colored hearts that flood the market at Valentine’s and carry messages such as KISS ME and LOVER BOY. Every year, Necco organized a ceremony at which Marshall—who was, in a promotional flourish exquisitely unsuited to his laconic demeanor, known as the King of Hearts—unveiled a new slogan. (This was Necco’s effort to keep up with the times, and while I could appreciate the bid for free publicity, some of the more recent efforts had been less than titillating—FAX ME, for example.)
Marshall was in a tizzy. He was wearing a lab coat with his name stitched above the breast pocket and a tie knotted a bit too tightly, and the lab coat fluttered behind him as he whisked around the corporate offices of Necco. He settled behind his desk, a desk littered with candy hearts and memos regarding candy hearts, and fixed me with a look of not-quite-concealed impatience. “Alright, here’s the story of how I got into the candy business,” he said, though I had not yet asked him how he got into the candy business.
Marshall’s father, it turned out, had been a traffic cop in front of the Schrafft’s building. So Marshall landed himself a summer job in 1953 and stayed with the company for 25 years, working his way up to Executive Vice President/General Manager. He joined Necco in 1987 and was now, he reported, “in the twilight of a mediocre career.” I found this odd. Here was a man who could take an elevator down one flight and order an entire run of chocolatecovered turtles and take them home with him. This did not strike me as the prerogative of a mediocre career.
Whatever his self-esteem issues, Marshall possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s confectionery past, which began in 1765, when an Irish immigrant named John Hannon established America’s first chocolate mill on the banks of the Neponset River in Dorchester. Marshall himself was born in Dorchester and used to walk by that factory every day. “You could almost taste the chocolate in the air,” he said. The earliest candy companies in Boston were roadside operations. They cooked stuff up in the kitchen and sold it out front. The proximity of the chocolate mill, two sugar refineries, not to mention a sizable population, made the city a confectionery hub. With the introduction of the steam engine, local companies began producing the first candymaking machines. Foremost among these
was Oliver R. Chase’s lozenge cutter, which began producing the wafers later known as Neccos in 1847. They were a staple of the Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War. In 1901, Chase bought two other companies and dubbed his outfit the New England Confectionery Company, the world’s first candy conglomerate.
The first half of the twentieth century was, Marshall assured me, Boston’s freak zenith. The city was home to 140 candy companies by 1950, with sales of $200 million per year. Necco’s Sky Bar—a slab of milk chocolate infused with four distinct fillings—was among the most popular bars on the East Coast. When World War II ended, all the New York papers ran stories reporting that the famous Sky Bar billboard in Times Square was finally illuminated again.
The beginning of the end for Boston came with the rise of the national candy conglomerates: Hershey’s and Mars. They understood that distribution had changed. Mom-and-pop stores were on the wane. Manufacturers had to connect with the big chains. And they had to be more centrally located, so they could ship nationwide.
Unable to compete with the candy giants, Necco flirted with insolvency during the sixties. The company’s execs realized they were going to have to grow to survive and began buying up struggling competitors. There was no shortage: Candy House Buttons, maker of those curious strips of colored candy dots on wax paper. Stark, Necco’s only competitor in the wafer and candy heart world, and producers of the old-school peanut butter taffy known as the Mary Jane. Great American Brands, best known for its Haviland chocolates. And, just last year, the venerable Clark Bar Company of Pittsburgh. What Necco had amassed, not entirely on purpose, was a retro candy empire.
Marshall looked up from his desk. He was done with his lecture. Martha Stewart was, presumably, waiting in the wings. (FAX ME!) The moment of truth had now arrived.
“I’d like to tour the factory,” I said.
Marshall sighed. “Fine. We can have Manny show you around.”
I MANNY
Manny De Costa, the facilities manager at Necco, met me the next day at company headquarters on Mass Ave. He looked like a slightly puffed version of Norman Schwarzkopf: stern, firm-chinned, capable of inflicting significant damage with his bare hands, though he turned out to be the nicest man imaginable and no danger to anyone at all, unless you happened to be coated in chocolate.
The retro theme of Necco extended to the decor, which could have been generously described as Late Eisenhower. The elevator had a gold-plated dial above it, with an arrow to indicate the floor. The filing cabinets were wooden. On the wall was a poster, illustrated in the manner of a Watchtower magazine, which read NECCO: THE MODERN CANDIES WITH A TRADITION OF QUALITY. The only indication that the Korean War had, in fact, ended was the ’N Sync poster in the receptionist’s cage.
“This building’s been here since 1927, so a lot of this stuff is from quite a while ago,” Manny explained. “We don’t really throw anything out.” Manny himself had come to Necco as a shipping clerk 35 years ago. (His father had been an elevator operator.) Now, Manny oversaw six floors and 400 employees. He was dressed in a suit and tie, which he accented—for our visit to production areas—with a white gauzy shower cap that sat on his head like a collapsed soufflé.
The secret to virtually all nonchocolate candy, Manny explained, was time and temperature. The longer and higher you cooked the basic ingredients—sugar, corn syrup, starch—the harder the candy became. On the fifth floor, where Necco made taffy, they were heating the staples to 243 degrees in gigantic kettles. The taffy was then poured onto cooling wheels the size of steamrollers, which squeezed the stuff into sheets that looked like stained glass. The taffy, still a blazing 180 degrees, was cut into 67-pound batches and heaved onto cooling tables, then lugged onto mechanical pulling hooks.
The taffy, yanked to and fro by two rotating arms, gradually softened and turned opaque. At this point, the glob—looking very much like an albino python—got hoisted onto the batch roller, a pair of knobbed rotating wheels which massaged the taffy into a thin rope. The next machine chopped the rope into bite-size pieces, wrapped them in waxed paper, and sent them whizzing down a conveyor belt for packing. Manny plucked a piece off the belt and handed it to me. It was still warm.
Down on the third floor, wafer production was in full swing and I immediately experienced that overwhelming olfactory blast known as Halloween Smell; a free-floating bouquet of sugar, cocoa butter, and flavorings. The wafers required no boiling. Instead, the ingredients were pulverized in giant mixers, producing a grainy paste that looked sort of like caviar, if you can envision caviar in the neon register. The paste was rolled into thin sheets and punched into the desired shape. This punching happened very quickly. (So quickly that it occurred to me—in one of those moments of morbid speculation that besets me when I’m overstimulated—that I could have slipped my hand under one of the mechanized pistons and wound up with Necco stigmata.) At peak efficiency, a single assembly line can kick out 38,000 pounds of candy per day, or 15,390,000 wafers. I am not going to tell you that this is enough wafers to stretch from the earth to the moon six times. I will say, only, that it is a lot of fucking wafers.
Manny, who displayed an endearing (if not entirely hygienic) habit of sampling the raw paste for quality with his thumb, was a lifelong fan. “We used to go to the movie theater and fling them at the screen. Actually, we only threw the ones we didn’t like. I didn’t like the purple ones, so I threw those.” Anyone familiar with the Necco flavor pantheon will commend Manny on his good taste in this matter. I myself had often pondered just what flavor purple was supposed to signify. Frankincense? Turpentine? The correct answer, as Manny noted with some dismay, was clove. Why anyone would wish to produce a cloveflavored candy remained obscure. (Paging MWM.)
The Necco packing process had changed very little over the years. Tubs of wafers were fed into a giant hopper and poured down a pipe from the third floor to the second, where they funneled into rows. A crew of women then pinched up a length of wafers between their two index fingers and dropped them in racks. Picture having to fill roll after roll of quarters in a faint cloud of sugared starch, and you get the idea. The racks were pushed along to a final inspector, who surveyed each package to make sure all eight colors were represented among the 38 to 40 wafers per pack. If not, she plucked out repeats and inserted missing colors. All this happened in approximately four seconds. The floor beneath this operation was a vast and dazzling fresco of broken wafers.
The big buzz around Necco was the company’s newest acquisition, the Clark Bar. With good reason. It is possible to say that you have not lived a fully actualized life unless you have eaten a Clark Bar straight off the assembly line. I am qualified to make this judgment because I have eaten a Clark Bar straight off the assembly line. I have eaten two.
A native of Pittsburgh, the Clark was first produced in 1917 and became one of the most popular bars of the post–World War II candy boom. It consists of a crunchy peanut filling covered in a milk chocolate coating. Most people would compare it to the Butterfinger, though it has far more peanut flavor than a Butterfinger and a softer bite. Necco itself used to produce a chocolatecovered peanut crunch known as the Bolster Bar. But everyone seemed to agree the Clark Bar was tastier. This, according to Manny, is because of the Clark’s unique production process.
Step 1: The staples were boiled into a sticky glop, cooled, and pulled to a beige, taffylike consistency.
Step 2: The filling was fed into a huge machine which flattened it and spread a layer of real peanut butter on top. A single worker, hovering over the machine with a spatula, rolled this slab into a sort of giant burrito. This step was the linchpin of the entire Clark gestalt. It ensured that the filling was striated into sediments of peanut butter and crunch. (Manny later demonstrated this to me by biting a snack-size bar lengthwise and showing me the sediments.)
Step 3: The burrito was lowered into a batch roller, where it was funneled down and came snaking out, tickertape style, to be cut into segments.
S
tep 4: The peanut crunch was now ready to be covered in chocolate, a process known as enrobing. Enrobing is the money shot of candy production, a sight so sensual as to seem pornographic. The conveyor belt carried the naked Clarks forward, into a curtain of chocolate, which, in spilling down, created the delicate ripples and wavelets you find atop most candy bars. It is this illusion of liquidity that I have always found so seductive; when we look at the top of a candy bar, what we see is a particular moment, the dynamism of the fluid state captured.
Step 5: The wet bars were carried into a cooling tunnel. A half hour later they emerged, 100 yards down the line, ready for packing. The entire genesis of the Clark, from raw ingredients to wrapper, took 90 minutes.
The fresh bar had a more supple consistency than storebought. The peanut butter was more redolent. The chocolate coating melted the moment it hit your tongue. “Fresh off the line is a different thing,” Manny said. “It’s like from someone’s kitchen. I eat them all day long. That’s why I’m as big as I am.”
It was precisely at this moment, watching Manny De Costa pat his stomach and laugh in a jolly vibrato while offering me a second fresh Clark Bar, that I considered asking him to adopt me. This feeling was reinforced during our brief trip to the sample shop on the first floor, where Manny and his wife—who, it turned out, worked in the sample shop and was, if this is even possible, nicer than Manny—foisted a shameful amount of candy onto me, which I tried (not very hard) to refuse, and which I seriously considered donating to orphans, before deciding, instead, to eat it all myself.