Gus Rancatore via gmail.com to Posterous, bcc: Corby, bcc: Cornelia, bcc: Diane

show details 7:09 PM (0 minutes ago)

Corby Kummer writes about Necco wafers in The Atlantic. Necco sold its building to Novartis and recently abandoned a natural line of flavors to return to their previous forumulations.

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/10/new-natural-neccos-now-old-news/247326/

Corby follows up on an article by Taryn Luna from The Boston Globe.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2011/10/25/necco_goes_back_to_original_wafer_recipe/

I was the oldest of five children, born to parents who’d lived through the Depression. And they lived through the Depression by eating Necco wafers. As a child if we went to the movies with our father he would frugally buy a nickel roll of Necco wafers for all of us to share while watching double bills in the St. George Theater near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. How many Alka-Seltzer-like tablets were there in a roll? Did we each get two, one for each movie, perhaps one to dissolve watching Jimmy Stewart in Broken Arrow, and another for the madcap misadventures of Frances Joins the Army. Francis was the talking mule whose black and white classics could be seen on Saturday afternoons during the long afternoon that was the Eisenhower years.

Years later after opening Toscanini’s one of our first memorable customers was a man who claimed to a faculty member at MIT. He came in the store during our first month of operation, “Do you know how Necco wafers luminesce?” he asked. Necco wafers were not a happy memory for me; they represented the economic calamity visited upon my parents which reverberated upon our own generation. “You know how some Necco wafers light up in the dark when you bite them?” And of course I did because I could recall looking down the theater row where my younger brother, sitting next to my father, would be snapping Wintergreen Necco wafers like a beatnik on Dobie Gillis. The man who claimed to be an MIT professor asked to try all the ingredients in the store in an attempt to find similar illuminating foods. Was he really an MIT professor? I still see him on the streets of Cambridge, noticeably heavier, and that makes me think he has been eating other things.