The 60-Year-Old Candy Bar

A few days ago I went looking for an Oh Henry!. I’m not sure why. There are a few reasons why I should not have been looking for an Oh Henry! not the least of them having to do with type-2 diabetes. Nevertheless I found the bar, bought and ate it and reconnected with a lot of things that had disappeared into the nether regions of my braincase.

I remember buying the candy on my way home from school and taking care not to exhale in the direction of my mother who could detect peanut breath at preternatural distance. Failure to cloak it meant a short pithy speech titled “Spoiling Supper” that often included ominous references to dentistry. The peanuts were clearly the triggers that blew my cover and I considered short-circuiting the alarm by picking them out, but the Oh Henry! experience would not have survived. The bar became an Oh Henry without the punctuation.

So why, 60 years later, with total awareness of blood sugar issues and the danger of dental consequences was I suddenly out looking for that Oh Henry! experience? I guess I had other things lurking in the braincase.

Like Hank Aaron. Hank was a great ballplayer. I didn’t follow his teams but I had tremendous respect for his skills long before his run for The Record. Babe Ruth’s 714 homers stood for nearly four decades and seemed beyond human capacity in the doing and even harder to match. Impossible – until Hank stepped up to the plate on April 8, 1974 and hit number 715. That shot went much farther than over the wall. It penetrated deep into the heart of racism in baseball – an unsustainable hatred to which not even a hard-core bigot could cling. A great player topped The Babe’s record. So he was black and The Babe was white. It’s done. Get over it.

I already had a deep, personal appreciation of the value of black players in baseball. Without Jackie Robinson my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers would never have won the ’55 World Series. Any Brooklyn fan knows what that means.

Back to the candy.

Sometime during Hank’s run for the record the bar’s manufacturers tried to reposition the bar in his image. Babe Ruth had his Baby Ruth. Now Hank had Oh Henry!. I was already buying, but I bought more. Then I stopped. And then I came back a few days ago after a 30+-year hiatus.

I’ve read about the reasons why we buy. Some of it is dense and complex and dips into the Dispositional Theory of Moods, Mood-Congruent Cognition and stuff like that I refer to when I get too deep (over my head) into theory. I do know some of it is beyond research and reasoning. But more than one generation is recalling what they bought “back then” and driven by distant memories are buying again.

All I know is that an old brand reached out to me from half a lifetime ago and brought back the good and the bad of baseball, race relations and peanut breath.