James Preller's Blog

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It’s remarkable that we live in a world where we can still purchase Chuckles candy. After everything’s gone so wrong, how is it that we’ve got this one thing right? Chuckles is like a food item left to us from an alien world. A distant galaxy. And certainly a different time. 

Think of the things that didn’t exist when Chuckles first hit the scene in 1921. This colorful, sugar-sprinkled “jellied candy” arrived before smartphones and the internet, before alarm clocks and avocado toast, before scotch tape and sliced bread, before the chocolate chip cookie and TV dinners, before the cheeseburger and chicken nuggets, before the walkie talkie and the electric guitar, before the frisbee and jukebox, before everything bagels and string cheese, before M & Ms and Gobstoppers, before Sour Patch Kids and the Charleston Chew, the Milky Way and Hershey’s Kisses, Milk Duds and Heath Bars and Tootsie Roll Pops and Red Hots, before the microwave and the atomic bomb.

Today we can walk into a convenience store and find that tidy rectangular rainbow of jellied confectionary in red, yellow, black, orange, and green. The mighty Chuckles, perfectly packaged in thin cardboard and a cellophane wrapper. Even the typeface is exactly right with those two cockeyed eyeballs over the u. 

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Chuckles began more than one hundred years ago when a man named Fred Amend introduced his latest edible invention to the unsuspecting world. Amend’s genius? He figured out how to make jellied candies that didn’t stick together. Amend threw together a few wholesome ingredients: corn syrup, sugar, cornstarch, modified food starch, natural and artificial flavors, red 40, caramel color, yellow 6, blue 1, and yellow 5 and . . . presto!

These days, now a grown man, I’m like that bee buzzing by the flowers, seeking nectar, thinking: sugar, sugar, sugar. I blame my father for my sweet tooth, for he did the food shopping in our family. On Saturdays, Dad ventured out alone and performed the massive, weekly food shop at Bohacks or the A & P for a family of nine ravenous mouths. When Dad pulled up to the house in a station wagon crowded with groceries, it was expected that all available children would file out to help, passing along the behemoth brown bags like a fire brigade.

It was a ton of food. And if we are in fact what we ate, here’s a snapshop of me: cans of vegetables, peas and corn and carrots. TV dinners. Campbell’s soup. Juice and six-packs of soda (we kept it warm under the sink) and Maraschino cherries for cocktails. Pop-tarts and big boxes of sugary cereals (Quisp was my childhood favorite) and “family-sized” packages of Reese’s Peanut Cups and a bag or two of those pink wintergreen mints he loved so much. Dad was a devout Entenmann’s man, of course, so there would be coffee cake and raspberry danish and whatever else struck his fancy. Open to inspiration while wandering the aisles, Dad was prone to coming home with surprises. 

What chance did I, just a child, have in the face of all that goodness? I caught the buzz even then: sugar, sugar, sugar. 

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One day we’ll look up and Chuckles will be gone the way of the dodo, destined to extinction, surpassed by Gummy Worms and Life Savers Gummies or Skittles or what have you. But for now, count your blessings. And be like me: once a year, or once every few years, pick up a sleeve of Chuckles at the neighborhood convenience store. It’s like tasting the Olden Days. A magical portkey that transports us through time to a simpler era.

Sugar, sugar, sugar.

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