Free Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond Page B

anyone who has spent several years privately gloating because they own the British import, only to discover there are people out there with the original demos—on four-track. I was, at best, a semipro. This became quite clear to me when I met Ray Broekel.
    Broekel is a legend among the confectioniscienti, for the simple reason that he knows more about candy bars than anyone else on earth. He is the author of two books, The Great American Candy Bar Book (1982) and The Chocolate Chronicles (1985), both of which I would characterize, loosely, as illustrated history books. Virtually every person I’d spoken to about candy was aware of Broekel. A number of them were under the impression that he was deceased. He is not deceased, though he is, at 80, somewhat past his prime in terms of Olympic competition. Wonderfully enough, he lives in Ipswich, just an hour north of Boston. I called Broekel and told him I was a great fan of his work and that I wanted to visit him.
    He paused for a long moment, breathing into the phone.
    “Well, alright,” he said.
    Broekel’s house is on a quiet street a few miles outside of town, just where the suburban streets give way to rural routes. He met me at the door, wearing a sweatshirt with Looney Tunes cartoon characters and a Chicago Cubs cap and large squarish glasses of the sort I associated with junior high school science teachers, which is what Broekel was before he became a full-time writer.
    As on the phone, I began gushing about his work.
    Broekel stood in the doorway, his eyebrows tipped skeptically, waiting for me to peter out. “Stuff’s downstairs,” he said and shuffled down to a sunken basement–type thing that I recognized immediately as the TV room of my childhood home: the same dispirited light and wood paneling and battered lampshades.
    Or maybe it would be more accurate to say the room was what I fantasized our TV room might have looked like, had I been allowed to decorate. The shelves were jammed with candy boxes. I recognized a few (Mounds, Reggie!). But most were brands that predated me (Winkers, Toppers, I Scream, Pie Face, So Big, Cocoanut Cakes) with giddy fonts which had faded over the years.
    One in particular that leapt out at me was Bit-O-Choc, because I’d just been explaining to my friend Ann that Bit-O-Honey did, in fact, produce a chocolate taffy bar for a few glorious years back in the seventies, a topic that enthralled me to no end. (Her response: “This topic is bit O boring.”)
    We stood there for a few minutes admiring the boxes.
    “That’s a lot of boxes,” I said.
    “There’s more,” he said.
    He led me down the hall to an even smaller room, which was piled high with megapacks of toilet paper and SOS pads and animal crackers. Broekel had more boxes here, lined up on a high shelf. Again, I recognized very few of the names—Snirkles, French Pastry, Old Nick, Best Pals, Honest Square, Forever Yours. (As a matter of fact, Forever Yours was the dark chocolate version of the Milky Way, which had been introduced in the thirties then abandoned. It has since been reintroduced, as the Milky Way Midnight.) On the table below this display, next to a paper cutter, Broekel had a stack of old advertisements mounted on poster board.
    “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