Aug 24, 2011 4 min read

How about a little nostalgia?

Everybody is used to getting their soda in bottles, mostly plastic, although there are still a few varieties encased in glass.

But who can remember when you could get carbonated drink in a tablet? That’s right. A tablet.

Remember “Fizzies”?

Mom used to get them for me and my brother way back in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

For the uninformed, Fizzies were flavored tablets about the size of a quarter that you dropped into a glass of water. The only thing on the market today that are even remotely reminiscent of them are “Alka Seltzer” tablets.

Anyway, the tablets would boil, bubble and…well…fizz, (hence the name) creating a glass of a flavored carbonated drink.

There were cherry, lime, root beer, orange and several other flavors that I can’t recall. My favorite was root beer.

Of course as kids often do, we figured out other ways to use the tablets. My brother and I would have contests to see how long we could hold one in our mouth. It was a lot like trying to hold a couple of live bees buzzing around in your mouth only far less gross. I don’t think either of us could hold a tablet until it was completed dissolved.

After doing a little research on the Web, I learned that Fizzies were reintroduced in the 1990s but apparently just didn’t capture the market the way they did originally. In fact, I learned the original Fizzies contained the sugar substitute cyclamate. In 1968 the FDA banned the use of cyclamates citing research showing that cyclamates caused cancer in laboratory animals and the company went out of business. (As a side note, in the 1990s another company bought the formula for Fizzies and they are being produced today. You can find them online).

Another confection I enjoyed was a caramel sucker called a “Sugar Daddy.” Grandma would pass a couple along to me each time I visited. These were hard rectangles of candy mounted on a paper stick. You licked and licked and licked and the sucker would slowly offer its flavor. Biting off a piece to chew did nothing to speed up the process. It just turned into a big glob of sticky caramel that dissolved about as slowly as an ice cube at the North Pole.

Grandma probably figured that if it took me a long time to eat one of those bars I wouldn’t be eating gobs of other candy.

There were other confections my generation loved. And we took every opportunity to sample them. I grew up with the penny candy store and the time when grade school kids could actually leave the building at lunch time to visit it.

Installed in old-fashioned wood and glass cases were wax tubes filled with tasty liquids, buttons of candy on strips of paper, about seven different varieties of bubble gum, taffy bars, wax lips, licorice bars, wax bottles, candy cigarettes (how politically correct would that be today?), chocolate-covered caramels, fireballs and even bubble gum cigars.

For a nickel you could get a bag of enough sweets to last the remainder of the day and well into the evening. But gasoline was only 29 cents a gallon then and the cherry Coke at the drug store soda fountain cost 7 cents. (It came in a paper cup).

So, I suppose, all things are relative. I can’t help but wonder what kind of nostalgia today’s generation will have to remember? Two big hamburgers for $2? A toy with every kid’s meal at the local fast-food eatery?

Somehow it just doesn’t seem the same.

Have a good day.