Childhood Treats, etc.

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1

It is clear to me now, looking back, that I was an odd child... and I liked it that way! 

If just about everybody I knew preferred one thing, I said (having first convinced myself) that I preferred something else. This peculiar effort to seem "special" extended to almost everything.  When just about all the boys I knew, for instance, were especially looking forward to the next Hopalong Cassidy comic, I focused all my attention on waiting for the next Red Ryder.  On Sundays, a bunch of us used to take the half-hour or so between Sunday School and Church to make a quick trip to a drug store two blocks away for a "cold drink" (as we called a soda); when the fad was for everyone to order a cherry coke at the soda fountain, I had a vanilla coke instead.  And later, when everyone was using ballpoint pens, I always used the equally-new ink cartridge fountain pens.

But, as for candy: when we went to the movies - which cost at that time 7 cents for each child - of course a few of us would get a box of popcorn, but as I recall it now, most seemed to prefer candy.  Milk Duds were the most popular, as I think back, with Junior Mints as a back-up.  Some would get Dots, and everyone who did gave their licorice Dots to me (since no one else would eat licorice).  I think it was later when M & Ms showed up, to great acclaim...

But as for me, I always bought... Bit-O-Honey. 

I know I did that because no one else I knew would eat Bit-O-Honey at all.  It wasn't just that I wanted it all to myself either; I sincerely tried to convince the others they should share in my delight.  No, the real reason was I had to be different, didn't I?

At a candy counter, if someone bought a Baby-Ruth, I pointed out that I preferred Oh Henry but they were harder to find where we lived in the depths of Texas.  Get the point?

2

But my fondest memories of all those thoughts of childhood candy are focused on the one summer before junior high when almost everyday, I went with one friend of mine - a guy nick-named by his parents Dos in order to avoid calling him "Junior" - to the best swimming pool in town, one of the few that opened at 9 a.m. seven days a week even though many days we were the only ones there at that time besides the lifeguards.  Our Moms took turns driving us out to the pool around 10 and then picking us up at 11:30 or so in order for us to be home in time for lunch.

Ordinarily, especially in a public venue, both Dos and I were rather inhibited.  But something in that cold spring water seemed to liberate us, and every day we did cannonballs off the diving board, or tried flips (and sometimes flops) and other silly plunges and splashes, howling and cheering all the way.  What must have those cool, handsome, tanned and well-muscled, 16-year-old lifeguards have thought of us two lunatics?

Anyway, this went on - believe it or not - for over an hour, every day.  Ten or fifteen minutes before the designated mother was to pick us up, we would drag our shivering and exhausted selves up the beautiful green hill from the pool to the street level... and stop by the candy-vending machine.  Dos introduced me to a special treat: the white chocolate covered Zero bar.

Now, that was perfect!  No one I knew (other than Dos, of course) had even noticed the Zero bar before.  I had one most days, although I would sometimes vary the series with another unusual choice, which I introduced to Dos (who was unimpressed): the Payday bar, covered with peanuts without chocolate. 

What's that?  No chocolate coating?  How could anyone want that? I imagined my friends asking, as I crunched my Payday, waiting for one of our mothers.

3

Some kids liked the straightforward milk chocolate Hershey Bar; I didn't particularly.  Others wanted Snickers or either Almond Joy or Mounds; I liked the flat, semi-sweet chocolate Mars bar.  Some liked Milky Way; I preferred Three Musketeers.

I mentioned earlier that when someone expressed a preference for Baby Ruths, I claimed to prefer the Oh Henry bar.  That one I confess I knew was not true, but the contrarian habit on these delectable matters was too strong to break, apparently. 

I had an interesting experience with Oh Henry many years later in France.

I had met an eminent French university professor, who for some reason seemed to have taken a liking to me.  M. W----- was a well-known French scholar of modern American literature, and maybe he enjoyed hearing Americans talk as part of his cultural education.

Well, one day M. W----- called and asked me to drop by his office at the university.  It seemed to suit his imposing position that he sat on his side of the wide dark wood desk in a big cushioned arm chair while his visitor was left to perch uncomfortably on the edge of a little light-colored straight chair.  On this occasion, he gestured that I should lean forward so he could show me the papers he was working on.

It turns out that M. W----- was working on a translation of Cane, which I learned was a novel written in the 1920's by a Harlem Renaissance figure named Jean Toomer.  M. W----- asked me to read a particular paragraph, which was about a kid walking along a littered railroad track, apparently in an urban area.  Describing the trash stirring around in the breeze, Toomer mentioned an old Oh Henry wrapper.

M. W-----, naturally, knew O. Henry as a popular writer of short stories, like "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Furnished Room."  What an O. Henry wrapper could be, he just couldn't figure out.  I believe he was embarrassed to ask me, but of course he couldn't translate what he did not understand.

It actually took me a minute or two before I had figured out the somewhat elliptical syntax.  Then I explained to M. W----- what an Oh Henry candy bar was.  (No, he didn't say he preferred Baby Ruth!)  Once he got it, by the way, he quickly changed the subject, and speaking in English, he asked:  "And what in the world is 'near beer'?"  Even though M. W----- was a known connoisseur of wine, not beer like those Germans, he was still offended to think that Prohibition had made Americans reduce the natural alcohol content in any drink.

5

When folks visited Mother or Dad at home when I was young, they would be welcomed into the living-room and offered a "cold drink."  At a soda counter, that meant what we now call a soda.  But in a private home, it might mean iced tea (which we called "ice tea" as though it were frozen) or even iced water.  In the home refrigerator when I was growing up, there was usually a six-bottle carton of Dr. Pepper or now and then RC Cola, and sometimes when I was being pampered there would be my own choice, Orange Crush.

It was always hot enough to make us thirsty two or three times during the day.  At most once a day, maybe after supper, we could have a cola or an Orange Crush.  But most of the time, we just grabbed for the flat-sided bottle Mother always kept full of iced water.  Sometimes there was also a pitcher of ice tea, but we had to ask before swilling any of it down; it took a long time to brew up some tea and then cool it down to the right sipping  or gulping temperature.  We often had milk at meals, and iced water was always available.

Once in a great while, Dad would be a little later than usual arriving for lunch.  That would be because he had stopped at a stand along his usual route to and from work to pick up some hamburgers for us.  It was a local chain that he preferred (as all of us did).  There must have been five or six scattered around the town.  There just weren't any national chain restaurants in my hometown, especially not for just hamburgers.  And these places weren't really restaurants either.  You went up to a little window and told the man or woman what you wanted, and after a few minutes, a brown paper bag would come out the window, and you paid and went away.  There was no indoor seating, only - sometimes - one or two wooden picnic tables jammed up against the outside wall of the stand.  The best one, where Dad stopped on the way home, was called Somewhere, serving Someburgers.

A hamburger anywhere in my hometown included lettuce, tomato, pickles, mustard and mayonnaise, and - unless you said otherwise - a big slice of onion.  The Someburger was a little bigger than the average and had more pepper on it than most.  Boy, would I like one now.

Were these fast-food stands? Well, you didn't have to wait very long, I guess.  But the kind of stand that served real cheap little patties on buns with ketchup, mustard, and pickle (onions? I guess so, chopped up real fine) did not appear at home until I was about ready to graduate from high school, and that place too was entirely local and was called 2-K's after the husband wife owners.

My family did not go out to eat very often, except after church on Sundays.  Then, we would usually go to this particular coffee-shop like, sit-down restaurant that was famous for its home-cooked fried chicken.  They always served biscuits and clover honey from Waxahachie, Texas, 100 miles or more to the north.

There was no pretending I preferred anything besides these family favorites, but on really hot nights when Dad would take us to that special (local) place where you could get an ice cream cone right in your car, when everybody else had chocolate or strawberry, or maybe peach, I would always get lime sherbet.

6

And then, what about the over-the-counter medicines we always seemed to have around?

My parents seemed to get what they called "sinus headaches" often.  They always had aspirin around, particularly Bayer in the little tins or St. Joseph in the same-sized cardboard containers.  But the pain-reliever of choice in the Derrick household became, and stayed, Anacin.  For years the ads for Anacin stressed that Anacin had two, not one but two active ingredients.  I don't think we figured it out that taking a regular aspirin and drinking a cup of coffee would have the same result, since the special ingredient was caffeine.  (It worked too.)

My Mother always liked to have diet control handy.  I don't think I ever chewed on an Ayds, as advertised by Arthur Godfrey (between Lipton tea ads), but that became another standard in our house.  Vaseline, of course, was always on hand.  For those skinned knees and other little scrapes, Mercurachrome was always around, since we didn't know at that time that mercury posed a health threat.  I also remember once in a while Dad's applying a bright purple fluid to splits in the skin between his toes (a typical problem in hot, humid climates).

We must have had cough drops around too, but I don't remember the favorites.  I did have a memorable experience in high school, though.  I had gone all the way through junior high with this one big guy.  He was a starting lineman on the football team, which by our junior year in high school (in Texas) was a big deal.  He was generally considered a nice person, but I didn't know him well and was a little intimidated by him.

Well, we had one class together, probably the required Texas History.  R--- sat right in front of me, so that the size of that huge frame was obvious to me all the time.  One day during class I had one of those nagging coughs.  I just couldn't get it under control.  After 15 or 20 minutes, when our teacher turned around to the chalkboard, R--- turned around to me and said, "These things really work" as he handed over a little box of something I'd never seen before: Throat Disks.

I didn't hesitate to pop one of these flat, little brown disks into my mouth, but immediately wondered if I'd made a mistake.  Could Mr. Nice-Guy R--- be playing a little trick on me?  The Throat Disk had a sharp odor and taste that moved right up my nose.  (I knew years later that one of the active ingredients was chloroform!)  The taste itself was kind of good, but utterly new.  Was I going to be the laughing stock of school by the end of that hour?

Before I got through wondering if I had been tricked, though, the cough was gone.  And it didn't come back.  R--- started moving to the door after class, but I got to him, thanked him, and noted that the Throat Disks had stopped my cough once and for all.  He just treated this whole thing as just normal, it would seem.

7

Unguentine, remember that?  In our house we usually had some around in case of little burns... What caused burns?  I don't remember, but we had some; I remember that.  I also don't remember why we sometimes had Absorbine Junior on hand.  Campho-Phenique was always in the medicine cabinet, primarily to treat my many fever blisters.  Benedryl was the typical prescription medicine to address my perpetual allergy problems.

And... oh, I hate to remember it.   Mother kept in the refrigerator a little bottle of Cod Liver Oil; what was that for anyway?  We kids did hate to take that stuff.

It's surprising to discover now that looking back on all of those things - the smelly or foul-tasting medicines right along with the burgers, soft drinks, and candy - is all equally pleasant.

And oh, by the way, when there was the big argument among my friends about which was better, Spearmint or Doublemint?  My own choice of chewing gum ... was Clove.

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