What ever happened to Penny Candy … better yet … what ever happened to Kids Birthday parties at their house? We didn’t have a Chucky Cheese, Dave and Busters or a kid drop off facility to throw a birthday party … we had our house’s and in my case a basement with a large folding table that the kids gathered around to sing Happy Birthday and eat cake. Dad would hang canvas cloth from clothesline to hide his work bench and the downstairs toilet that was in every house back in the day. Mom would have little favor bags to give to each of the neighborhood kids and cousins that were filled with penny candy! Oh yeah, I got carried away for a minute … what ever happened to Penny Candy? In fact, what ever happened to pennies? I hear they are going away also. Penny candy … I’m talkin’ about licorice whips, flying saucer wafers filled with candy beads, wax lips and mustaches, licorice records, candy dots on a paper strip, coconut bars, jaw breakers and bubble gum … in little paper nickel bags. Where could one find penny candy? Well in my case, Lou’s and Mary’s neighborhood store … there was one in every neighborhood where we grew up. How could a young person obtain penny candy at the candy store? We didn’t have money at that early age unless you had a paper route, did errands for neighbors or in the Winter, shovel walks for some cash. However, there were always pop bottles! Pop Bottles you may say … that’s right in the dinosaur days when I grew up… a young person could collect pop bottles and return them to just about any store for two cents on small bottles and a nickel for the quart size bottles. With an armful of bottles, you could cash them in at the candy store and buy a dime bag worth of penny candy! Heck if you went on a buddy bottle hunting spree you could collect enough pop bottles to buy candy for the whole neighborhood! Pop bottles were a major source of income as a kid living on Smithton Street! As I look back on those wonderful days, I kind of feel bad for kids growing up today … we had fun with very little, learned how to survive and be creative learning valuable lessons from a neighborhood that helped raise us! I guess I should explain the photo above … it was my Birthday Party on Smithton Street and in attendance was my cousins, Ronnie and Alfred, Jimmy and Davey … and of course by childhood and lifelong friends like Willie and Junior … yep there were even girls invited to my parties even though I was too young to really appreciate the girls. That is me on the far right of the photo. I miss those good old days … and especially “Lou’s and Mary’s” and “Penny Candy”!