by Steve Almond
“Where’d you get all these?” I said.
Broekel picked up the ad on top. “This one came from the Delineator. That’s a magazine. It’s from 1926.”
“How did you find it?”
“I found people with old wrappers and old ads and I just bought them.”
I grow puppyish when afforded the chance to discuss candy, but Broekel exuded the grim intensity of an archivist. His chief priority was to make sure everything got seen. Out of the pantry we went, down the hall, to a bank of shelves packed to overflowing with candy tchotchkes: fridge magnets, key rings, toys, PEZ dispensers, piggy banks. This was not what Broekel wanted to show me.
What he wanted to show me was a pair of shoulder-high green file cabinets tucked behind the shelves. He opened the one on the left. It was full of candy wrappers, alphabetized by company and filed in folders—hundreds, thousands of wrappers wedged together in crinkled sediments. Broekel didn’t know exactly how many he had, but he figured around 20,000. He opened the file cabinet on the right. “These are the foreign ones.” He opened the second drawer down. “More foreign ones.”
Before I could ask Broekel how, exactly, one acquires 20,000 candy wrappers, he was off to another room, a kind of workshop area. The ceiling was decorated with old movie posters. A wooden plaque over the door read, I FINALLY GOT IT ALL TOGETHER, BUT I FORGOT WHERE I PUT IT. On the opposite wall was an honorary degree from Illinois College awarded to Rainer Luthar Broekel (it took me a moment to make the connection) and beneath this a colorful poster with a rooster exhorting the world to buy the Chicken Dinner candy bar. Broekel pointed to a large, black carrying case. It looked like the kind of thing Atticus Finch might have lugged around.
“Candy box,” Broekel said.
With some difficulty, he wrestled the box off the sill and onto the floor. He unsnapped the latches and folded back the top to reveal two trays of candy, one with a dozen packs of LifeSavers and the other with a Sky Bar, some licorice, and a few pieces too warped to identify. I was not much impressed. Then Broekel knelt down and pulled these trays apart, and a third and fourth tray appeared, then a fifth and a sixth. He kept pulling until fourteen trays of candy were accordioned out before us in neat tiers, an entire portable candy rack stretching four feet across and including 30 different candy bars, gum balls, caramels, hard candies, Kits, Sen-sen, something called Lik-M-Aid, and something else called Coco-Melo.
“This is from the 1950s,” he said. “It was used by a salesman in western Pennsylvania. He would carry this around to show what he had to offer and the merchant would place his order. It cost me $550. This is all the original stuff that was in there. The Snickers and Milky Way, those are from the 1930s.” Broekel stared down at his pièce de résistance and flashed his bottom row of teeth in a shy smile. “That pretty much does it.”
THE LOVE SONG OF RAY LUTHAR BROEKEL
Broekel seemed to feel that our visit had drawn to a close. I explained that I had a few more questions and we returned to the den and settled down across from one another. On the table next to me sat a tiny vending machine from the 1930s, which had been used to sell one-cent Hershey bars.
I asked Broekel if he’d always been interested in candy.
“Not really,” he said.
“How did you decide to start writing about candy bars?”
“Well, I’m a writer.” He pointed to a shelf across the room.
“All those books up there, those are mine. I’ve written more than 200. Most of them are informational in nature.” Broekel’s speech had a nasal, humming quality, as if perhaps he were speaking through a tube that was underwater.
It was not entirely clear to me that he could hear my questions. So I started talking louder: “BUT SOMETHING MUST HAVE INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE ABOUT CANDY BARS, SIR.”
Broekel paused. “Nothing had been written about them. People had written about candy, but not candy bars. The idea just came to me and I went downtown and got a couple of candy bars and looked at the wrappers and called the manufacturers to get more information. At a certain point, I looked around and realized I had a book on my hands.”
“Right,” I said. “Okay.” I leaned back in my chair, waiting, in vain, for Broekel to elaborate. “What was the response?”
“I did a book tour sponsored by the National Confectioners Association. But the book went out of print while I was on tour.”
“Why did you think the book didn’t sell?”
“People didn’t buy it.”
“How did you decide to write the second book?”
“I got more information.”
“Would you call yourself the foremost candy bar historian in the world?”
“Yes.”
“Are there any others?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Do you have a sweet tooth?”
“Not particularly.”
Broekel looked at me with his watery blue eyes. It occurred to me, as I sat there trying to think of what to ask him next, that much of the reason I’d stopped reporting was because of situations like this. They required a certain tolerance for artifice; both parties had to stick to the script—the intrepid reporter, the eager subject—and even if they played their parts to the hilt, the result was a performance, an imitation of life. If one or both parties failed (and we were both failing here) the result was excruciating silence.
I glanced around the den. One entire wall was covered with lapel buttons. BURN POT, NOT PEOPLE. I’M A JAZZ BABY. BUNKER IN ’72. BAN DDT. It was obvious that Broekel was a purebred collector, that any effort to explore his personal psychology was doomed. Stick to the collectibles, I told myself.
“What’s your favorite piece?” I asked him.
“Dream Bar,” Broekel said.
He got up and gingerly removed a box from the shelf. The front cover was a full-color lithograph of a boat, a schooner of some kind, covered with children. The children were all dressed in nightgowns and pajamas. The deck was covered with pillows and blankets. The rails were actually bedposts. Above them, a yellow crescent hung against the night sky and the stars twinkled madly. The sea was an inky blue-and-black sheen. The effect of the image was hypnotic. It captured the soft, fluid logic of the dream world, a place where children could peacefully sleep while waves licked at their toes. Broekel brought me a second box of the same vintage, this one for Milky Way—a surreal landscape, with billowing palm trees and a greenand-orange cloud system. There was no need to ask him why he favored these pieces. They were the sort of illustrations that belonged in a museum. One could imagine a young artist, an Andrew Wyeth or Maurice Sendak say, sitting in some tiny office during the Depression, creating these wild visions. They made the other boxes, the more modern stuff, look like, well, packaging.
Broekel sat down in his chair again. I sensed another wretched silence coming on. Thankfully, there was a knock on the door and Broekel went to answer it. He reappeared with a FedEx package. Inside was a Mounds wrapper from 1945, which he had lent to PBS for a documentary they were preparing about a radio correspondent who had been sponsored by Mounds.
I asked Broekel to tell me about the most interesting candy bar he’d come across.
“What do you mean, ‘interesting’?” he said.
“Well, like, the one with the most interesting ingredients.”
Broekel thought about this. “Vegetable Sandwich,” he said finally.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve got a picture,” he said.
He walked out of the room and returned with a magazine article he’d written on ten candy bar classics. Number two was the Vegetable Sandwich, a bar introduced during the health craze of the 1920s. 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 elaborate on the wrongness of this product, though I feel duty bound to report that one of the manufacturer’s taglines was WILL NOT CONST
IPATE. Yum. Amazingly, disturbingly, Vegetable Sandwich was not the only entry in the dehydrated vegetable candy bar derby. There was also the Perfect Bar (WE HAVE COMBINED IN THIS CONFECTION DEHYDRATED VEGETABLES RICH IN VITAMINS AND BRAN!).
Broekel’s shelf also boasted a vintage 3 Musketeers box. I have never had much respect for the modern bar. I will certainly eat them, but I tend to lose interest rather quickly and often resort to coaxing the filling out with my fingers, so that I’m left with a delicate chocolate shell. The name, also, has always perplexed me. In what way does this mono-filling candy bar, this dull brick of nougat, express threeness, let alone Musketeeritude? I had heard the well-trafficked rumor that 3 Musketeers was originally the name given to the Milky Way and that, through some royal industrial mix-up, the names had gotten reversed. But this struck me as a typical candy canard, wishful and harebrained. Broekel’s box solved this mystery. There, flanking a vivid portrait of the three soldiers with swords aloft, were the words CHOCOLATE, VANILLA, AND STRAWBERRY, 3 BARS IN A PACKAGE FOR FIVE CENTS.
I asked Broekel if he remembered the three-bar era.
“I was at the factory when the first bars came off the assembly line.”
“Wow,” I said. “When would that have been?”
“Some time in the thirties.”
I waited (again) for Broekel to elaborate. He did not. We had reached another one of those conversational cul-de-sacs. Broekel sighed. I sighed. The room sighed. I asked Broekel if he would sign my copy of The Great American Candy Bar Book. He picked up a pen from an end table and scrawled his name.
Upstairs, Broekel’s wife, Peg, was talking on the phone.
“What does your wife think of all this?” I asked him.
“It’s a hobby of mine.”
“I guess it could be worse,” I said. “You could be a beer can collector.”
“I collected those for a while,” Broekel said.
I remembered that in his book, Broekel had mentioned the idea of converting his archive into a candy museum. I asked him if that plan was still alive.
He shook his head again.
“What do you plan to do with all this stuff?”
“I really don’t know,” he said.
It was a solemn moment. I could foresee a day, in the nottoo-distant future, in which his remarkable trove would be boxed up and put in storage. Or worse yet, thrown away. I felt like telling him I’d be happy to serve as the executor of that portion of his estate focused on candy bars. But this was wildly presumptuous, given that he seemed not to like me very much. So I settled for asking to borrow a copy of his second book, The Chocolate Chronicles, before I took my leave. It was an oversized paperback, the spine badly tattered, the pages coming loose.
WELCOME TO THE BOOM
It is probably overstating the case to suppose that Broekel’s interest in candy bars stems from a need to reconnect to his childhood. But his history—which I did eventually wrestle out of him—bears mentioning. His family came to the United States from Germany in 1927 and settled in Evanston, outside Chicago. He was four years old. America was in the thrall of its first and most intense candy bar boom, fueled by the return of the doughboys. Nickel bars were ubiquitous. Every confectioner in the country produced at least one; the big companies produced dozens. The variety would have been especially dizzying in the Chicago area, which was rapidly overtaking Boston as the nation’s candy capital. This was an era before the onslaught of the modern snack industry, with its avalanche of chips and cookies. Aside from Hershey’s, there was no such thing as a national brand.
It is virtually impossible for a consumer today to understand the candy bar landscape that a young Ray Broekel would have encountered. In fact, Broekel told me that there have been more than 100,000 brands of candy bars introduced in this country, nearly a third of them in the years between World War I and the Great Depression. Even if he is off by a factor of two (and I tend to doubt he is) the numbers are boggling.
This is what makes Broekel’s books—both of which are out of print—such compelling reading. It is certainly not the prose, which tends toward skittish wordplay. Here, for instance, is the way Broekel introduces a section on the candy maker Peter Paul in The Great American Candy Bar Book: “Carmen Miranda was a singer known as The Brazilian Bombshell. Wearing elaborate dresses and huge headdresses laden with fruit, she appeared in numerous movies in the 1940s and early 1950s. What did Carmen Miranda have to do with a candy bar? Nothing. But something else from Brazil did: the Brazil nut.” Right.
Broekel’s obsession with pure documentation blossomed as he delved further into his research. By the time he wrote The Chocolate Chronicles, in 1985, he had dropped most of the rhetorical flourishes. This second volume reads like a dutiful compendium of facts. Given the commercial failure of the first book, it seems odd that he would attempt a second book at all. But this is missing the point. Broekel no longer viewed himself as an author in the traditional sense—that is, someone hoping to find an audience for his work—but as a collector of information. His obligation was chiefly to history.
Reading over Chronicles, one is struck by the strange, incantatory 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, Firechief, Wampum, Jolly Jack, Candy Dogs, Graham Lunch, Tween Meals, Hippo Bar, Old Hickory, Rough Rider, Bonanza!
I am but skimming the surface, here. Broekel notes, for instance, that the Sperry Candy Company of Milwaukee, by no means a huge operation, 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, Cool Breeze, Club Sandwich, Coco-Mallow, Coco Fudge, Big Shot, Cherry Delight, Hot Fudge–Nut, Almond Freeze, Mint Glow, Koko Krunch, and Ripple.
Nor did Broekel stop after the second book. Instead, he launched a homemade quarterly called the Candy Bar Gazebo, consisting almost entirely of Xeroxed candy wrappers gathered by him and a small stable of fellow candyfreaks (in the Broekelian nomenclature: “Foreign Correspondents” and “Roving Ambassadors”). In print, as in life, Broekel remained largely unburdened by the rigors of analysis. Broekel put the magazine out for nearly a decade and he still had most of the back issues, organized by quarter, in his basement. The editor’s note atop his final edition, published in winter 1995, provided a flavor of the endeavor: “All good times must come to an end, and that’s why this will be the last issue of Candy Bar Gazebo. News about old candy bars and old candy companies has been getting more and more difficult to obtain, and columnist Harry Levine of England passed away August 11, 1995.”
It should be clear that Broekel had gone completely and wonderfully bonkers by this time. I found his work irresistable. For the greenhorn candyfreak, it was like stumbling upon a hidden trove of unprocessed data. What was most fascinating about this data was not the origin or content of the bars themselves—the usual suspects all accounted for—but the way in which manufacturers sought to distinguish their brands.
The most common ploy was to link a bar to a figure from popular culture: Charles Lindbergh begat both the Lindy and Winning Lindy. Clara Bow begat the It bar. Dick Tracy had his own bar. So did Amos N Andy and Little Orphan Annie and Betsy Ross and Red Grange. Babe Ruth had a fleet of them, though the Baby Ruth, as any aficionado will tell you, was named after President Grover Cleveland’s daughter. Bars such as Zep and Air Mail were introduced to capitalize on the new allure of aviation. The Pierce Arrow was one of several bars named after a luxury car. The Big Hearted Al was named after failed presidential candidate Al Smith. Other bars celebrated popular expressions (Boo Lah, Dipsy Doodle), exotic locales (Cocoanut Grove, Nob Hill, 5th Avenue), dance c
razes (Tangos, Charleston Chew), local delicacies (Baby Lobster), and popular drinks (Milk Shake, Coffee Dan).
Other brands invoked the glamour of hit songs (Red Sails), carnival attractions (Sky Ride), quiz shows (Dr. IQ), high culture (Opera), even poets (Longfellow). The Longfellow is not to be confused with its inflammatory-sounding contemporary, the Long Boy Kraut. This moniker, contrary to my initial wishes, was not coined to exploit anti-German sentiment but because the bar’s coconut resembled pickled cabbage.
One did not have to be nationally famous to merit a candy bar. Several New England brands were named after the evangelical preacher George S. Needham. The Yale candy company named the Blue Boy bar after local football star Albie Booth. A Minneapolis firm paid tribute to a local tribe with the Yacki-Hula bar, which pictured Native American maidens on the label. Candy bars pervaded every strata of culture. They were sold at burlesque halls and gambling dens and hawked by religious cultists such as John Alexander Dowie, whose followers raised money for their community by producing, among other bars, the Fig Pie.
One can see, in this frenzy of brands, the birth of modern marketing, the beginning of the link made between what we consume as entertainment and what we consume as sustenance. And make no mistake: candy bars were viewed, especially during the Depression, as sustenance. They were America’s first fast food: cheap, self-contained, and (in the short-term at least) filling. For years, Broekel’s favorite bar, the Chicken Dinner, carried a picture of a steaming chicken on the label, an effort to convey its wholesome attributes.
In fact, the candy bar boom that swept the nation after World War I provided an ideal laboratory for the marketing techniques that would soon dominate American commerce. Because candy bars were cheap, people bought lots of them every day. Because the ingredients were quite similar, there was no appreciably qualitative difference between one bar and the next. The most important thing was to get people eating your bar, to establish your taste as familiar and desired.