Apparently, lot of famous things come from northwest Ohio. Ohio Art (makers of the Etch-a-Sketch) is based in Bryan, along with Spangler Candy Company, maker of the Dum Dum Sucker.
They offer tours of the facilities, so we bought our tickets, donned our hairnets, and got in line.
I didn't want to wear a hair net, but the promise of candy persuaded me. (That guy behind me was mama's elementary school principal. He was there with his grandkids, so mama made sure we were on our best behavior.)
The best part of the tour was that it was all on a trolley! For health reasons, we didn't get to see any of the candy getting made, but we did get to watch videos when the train wasn't moving. Mama remembers touring the factory as a kid and grabbing warm candy canes right off the line and making them into any shape you wanted.
Spanglers makes 10 million Dum Dum suckers and 500,000 Saf-T-Pops a day. They also are the only manufacturer of candy canes in the US (2.7 million a day!). Besides the classic red and white peppermint canes, they also make the Jolly Rancher, Jelly Belly, Shrek, and Cinabon candy canes you see at Christmas. One more cool fact for you: the candy canes are made in a big 125 pound batch. The stripes are hand applied to the big lump by the same guy who's been doing it for 35 years. Then it gets threaded through a machine that turns into 4,00 canes.
After the tour, Henry picked out suckers for us.
Mama reminisced about the old products that Spanglers used to make. She said she used to get these eggs because you could save them in the plastic "shell." She also spent a while looking longingly at the Astro Pop display.
After the tour, mama announced that she'd take us out to lunch at the McDonald's so we could play on the playland. She forgot that you needed socks, so she had to buy some from the counter. Too bad they only came in big kid sizes.
We played for a long time until June got tired and took up her spot on the steps.
Somebody get this baby home and in bed.
While June napped, mama introduced me to the last Spangler creation- the circus peanut.
It's a dense orange marshmallow shaped like a peanut with banana flavoring. Mama says the old tour used to go by a cascade of circus peanuts as they came off the line.
We ate a bunch, then made them into a jello salad. It was my job to count out 15 and cut them into quarters. I took it very seriously and was very proud that mama let me use a knife.
While I made jello, mama and Grandma made poppyseed rolls. They had leftover egg white, so next they made meringue cookies. I did not like the sound of the mixer going that fast.
But I did like showing off.
On our last night, we went to Sherwood to meet up with mama's friend, Miss Terika. And there's not much else to do in Sherwood besides get some ice cream at the Apache Dairy Bar and walk down to the train tracks. June really liked what we think was her first solo ice cream cone.
On the way home, mama was struck for a moment of how nice Northwest Ohio can be.
One thing is for certain, it looks very different from South Carolina. Mama spent some time telling us how you could see the blinking traffic lights at the corner of 249 and 127 as soon as you left Farmer, even though they were three miles away. And every road is square with the next one. If you miss your turn, just go another mile and turn there. No one can ever say that about South Carolina.
