candy. Most of the candy that I bought were the candy bars, and they sold for a

dime. The most expensive candy bar then was The Chunky, a small square mound of

chocolate, raisins, and nuts, that sold for a whopping 25 cents.

Some of my favorites from those times are still around today. They include Milky

Ways, Twizzlers, Raisinets, and Whoppers (malted milk balls).

But my two favorite candy treats from those days have, unfortunately, gone the

way of the dinosaur.

One is the Milkshake bar. It was sort of a poor man's Milky Way when eaten warm,

but put that bar in the freezer for a while, then eat it, and you had a

chocolaty piece of heaven.

The freezer worked wonders on some candy back then, but you had to be careful.

Put the wrong bar in a freezer and you'd have an uneatable mess that wouldn't

even taste the same when thawed. A Milky way was another good example of

freezable candy. But, I can tell you from experience, you did not want to

freeze Snickers, 3 Musketeers, Butterfingers, or Baby Ruths.

The best frozen candy, and my favorite candy of all time, was the Bonomo's

Turkish Taffy bar. They came in four flavors, Natural Strawberry, Natural

Banana, Natural Vanilla, and Natural Chocolate. I liked them all but the

chocolate, and would frequently alternate between the other three. I guess that

if you pinned me down and forced me to give you a favorite flavor, it would be

vanilla.

It was tempting to eat them straight from the shelf, and they were good that

way. But if you had the patience and fortitude to stick that same bar in your

freezer then wait a half hour, you'd have the candy the way it was meant to be

eaten.

When you took it out of the freezer, you'd snap it. Snapping it meant grabbing

an end of the thin bar and slapping it against the kitchen counter. You would

snap it enough to break it into small chunks. If it crumbled a little, you

probably overdid it, but still no problem. You could slide those small slivers

into your mouth at the end.

I once saw a friend of mine take a hammer to his frozen bar. This was a bad

decision, as he witnessed when he opened the wrapper to find only slivers. The

rule of thumb of any freezable candy was to never break them apart by any

artificial means, including kitchen utensils and items found in your father's

toolbox. If they couldn't be broken by hand, they weren't meant to be frozen.

Anyhow, it's refreshing to still see most of those candy bars still on the

shelves today. Just be careful what you freeze, okay?