Nostalgia: Hershey's Chocolate Bars

I bought a Hershey's Chocolate Bar and a Coke. They were on sale: buy two for $1.20 each, get a third free.

First off, what the hell? My Better Half would have paid 10¢ a bar in the early 1960's. I remember when they were a quarter, in the 1970s. The price slowly increased, perhaps due to the cost of ingredients.

Now I'm grinning. Does anyone still use the ¢ symbol? Maybe it died right after chocolate bars started to cost a buck. No, really. Look at your keyboard. When I learned to type, it was still assigned a key. On a typewriter. It was a prerequisite before we could take programming. In Basic. Seriously. Dot matrix printers and Tandy, anyone? God, I hit my half-century mark this year. Fuck!

I lost my train of thought. It must be a geriatric thing. Seriously. It will happen to you young folk. We used to talk about how many times we got laid in a week. Now we talk about how many times we pooped.

Chocolate. (No, we do not poop chocolate, although I hear it is a good laxative.) Anyhow, I am not going to go into the history of Hershey's Chocolate Bars. It is actually very interesting, but the Hershey Community Archives do a better job than I. "Hershey's Milk Chocolate: Bar Wrappers Over the Years".

Let us get back to the nostalgia of it all!

When I was a kid, our house was backed by an arroyo which divided us from the neighbors behind. It never divided us as kids, and was a common meeting ground for a few of us.

We would gather during the summer and do odd jobs for spare change, or else we would collect bottles to turn in for cash. Our money would be pooled so all of us went home with a candy bar and a Coke.

"Hershey bars" were the top pick. You could slide the wrapped bar from the brown sheath, then use that sheath like a kazoo. It annoyed the crap out of our parents. But, let's be real - that was the whole point. It also was not as good as a real kazoo...

Kazoo. You know, those plastic things that sound like tortured ducks screaming.

Years passed and my tastes turned towards M&Ms and Whoppers. The last time I had a Hershey Bar and Coke was in 1987 or so. My friend Pat bought them for me. 

We sat in her Gremlin and feasted on them while I sobbed about having to break up with my boyfriend, Bill. My parents thought I was spending too much time skipping school with him. It shattered him and me. I secretly hoped he would confront me about the letter I had to write to him. He never did. I suppose he would not have hated me as much if he knew it was dictated and the excuses for breaking up were NOT my own words. A true Romeo and Juliet tragedy

I finished my chocolate and soda, she drove me home. We met up again in the middle of the night, in the arroyo, under the full moon. She had a bag of full-sized Hershey Bars and soda, but also beer that she snagged from her garage fridge.

An hour or so passed. I never puked so hard in my entire life. Gravity dragged that barf down the slanted concrete walls and into the trickling stream. I coated that fucker. It looked like the world's biggest mammoth had the worst piles in all the history of mammoths. Pat laughed her ass off, naturally.

That is perhaps why I avoided the Coke/Hershey combo for decades. The barf, not Pat. She was my hero.

But today I was waiting for my mother to finish her appointment so I could drive her home, and it was buy two bars and get one free at Kroger, and I was starving. 

 

The experience took me back to high school. The chocolate tasted the same. And, as I was feeling pretty down emotionally, I ate all three bars.

And didn't puke.

Worth it.

 ✌️❤️🍫

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Want more horrid nostalgia? This evil song stuck in our heads for years.