The first half of the twentieth century was Boston's freak zenith. The city was home to 140 candy companies by 1950, with sales of $200 million per year. The beginning of the end for Boston came with the rise of the national candy conglomerates: Hershey's and Mars.

I was saddled with this strange name, which meant that I was constantly, constantly, being serenaded with the Sometimes you feel like a nut Almond Joy/Mounds jingle.

The craziest Peep-related candy I've ever gotten is a chocolate egg with a Peep inside it. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make that, which strikes me as both beautiful and pathetic.

I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways.

Nothing on Earth (is) so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.

At about the age of ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound. This was revolutionary. Here were entire stalls of candy, naked as the day they were born, piled up two feet high and God knows how deep. What it was beauty.