LEGENDARY COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER

Tasty Treats

An ice cream cone or a piece of candy was a big thing a hundred years ago. Nowadays, they are just another matter-of-fact thing in our day to day lives. Every country store had an assortment of penny candy. Some stores even have them still available, but they cost at least 15 cents.

Most cakes and pies were made by the housewife in those days. They were usually made on a Sunday when family dinners were the occasion. We can now buy any style cake or pie at a number of places. There is nothing like a piece of homemade apple pie made with cinnamon and a slice of cheddar cheese on top. Most cakes are made from a ready mix in a box and are quite good, especially if you add a box of pudding mix when making it.

Candy in the old days was a bit more limited in choices of what to get. It is hard to tell when hard candy was first sold in stores. Usually a bagful was a few pennies. When people came to town to get their staples in the 19th century, they usually found the few pennies to make the children happy.

Ice cream was made at home the old fashioned way. Some summertime venues still make and sell homemade ice cream when local fruits are in season. There is even an ice cream truck operating in Salisbury, but the cones are no longer a nickel. Ice cream cones were first made at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The ice cream vendor ran out of the paper cups he used. He got the idea of rolling up the confection sold next to him to make a cone shaped holder for his ice cream. The cone was invented.

Anybody growing up in Salisbury in the 1950’s has got to remember the Shore Maid Ice Cream truck. That distinctive bell was sure to bring out all the kids in the neighborhood. I think the truck was green and had some age on it, but that didn’t matter to us kids. Shore Maid had a store on Camden Avenue with an “S” shaped counter. It was always a special treat to be taken there. The different confectionaries all had ice cream, but Shore Maid was just special. Popsicle made the famous two-stick frozen treats that came in mainly orange, cherry and grape They also made a blueberry that left your lips as blue as could be. I think that more popular than the two-stick was the Dreamsicle, which was an orange creamsicle. It had a vanilla center with an orange ice coating and was mighty tasty on a hot summer day. Before the advent of the Popsicle, children would chase the home ice delivery man to beg some shavings from the cake of ice he was delivering,

Chewing gum has been around in its present form for years. Before that people had been chewing different substances for thousands of years. In my youth, the preferred gum of choice was the gum that came with baseball cards. In the summer, all of us guys had several slabs of the pink gum stuffed in our hip pockets. What seemed so innocent then has resulted in many a cavity over the years.