War Heads

Lately there have been a lot of "You know you're from <<insert home town here>> when..." postings on Facebook.  I particularly like the "Long-guy-land" ones, well, because I am originally from Long Island.  I do notice all of these posts have commonalities though: respecting your elders, playing outside, street lights for curfew, etc.  It does make me a little sad to think what the youth of today will remember from their childhoods.  Playing indoors all summer on the PS3, family road trips that involved Hannah Montana on DVD as opposed to playing "I Spy," family reunions where instead of playing volleyball and socializing they  were lost in their own little world playing Nintendo DS... it's sad, really.  

In reminiscing on my childhood there are major things that stand out.  Yes, we had a Nintendo but there were TV time limits and if it was daylight and not raining Mom forced us to play outside.  I had to wear a watch (not a digital one) to make sure to check back in at the house every half hour or so.  I wore out the tires on my ten-speed (boy was I cool with my gray and pink Huffy ten-speed) and my cousins and the local kids played man-hunt, H-O-R-S-E, cops and robbers, stick ball, touch football, and anything else we could come up with until we had to go home for dinner.  We loved the ice cream truck (I think Italian Ices were like $0.50 back then) and War Heads were the candy of choice.

Does anyone remember War Heads? Lemon was my favorite. We used to trade them on the bus like currency.  We would double-dog dare each other to try to eat more than one at a time and not make a face. We would check out each others tongues to see if there was any burn marks because we couldn't believe such a lethal tasting hard candy didn't in fact do so.  For a while there, War Heads were more popular than Bubble Tape bubblegum.  Can you believe these two candies are practically considered antique?  Seriously, when I searched Bubble Tape the first site it was listed on was "www.oldtimecandy.com."  Insane.  When I think of "old time candy" I think of root beer barrels, rock candy on a stick, and shoe string licorice.  What has the world come to??

For "old time's sake" leave me a comment and let me know what you remember from your childhood and what was so great about it.