19 Kinds of 1960s Chewing Gum and Candy You'll Remember

You peeled back the wrapper, and before the pink gum ever reached your mouth, you were reading. A tiny comic was folded around the piece. You read it right there on the sidewalk, then stuffed it in a coat pocket for later.

That ritual is older than you might think. Bazooka launched in the U.S. after World War II, and the first Bazooka Joe comics showed up inside the wrappers soon after. By the time you had pocket money of your own, Joe was already a fixture.

If a few of those comics survived in a shoebox or a cedar chest, lay three side by side on a dish towel by a sunny window and photograph them before the paper gets any more brittle.

You could spot it from across the store: a pack striped like a zebra, with a zebra on it to match. Inside, the wrappers did double duty as temporary tattoos. You licked a patch of forearm, pressed the paper down, waited, and peeled.

Fruit Stripe started at Beech-Nut as a multi-flavor fruit gum, and the zebra mascot and the tattoos became its calling cards.

Ferrara, its most recent maker, confirmed in 2024 that it had "sunset" Fruit Stripe. No new pack is coming.

If you spot one at an antique mall or an estate sale, buy it for the wrapper and keep it sealed. Don't chew it. Slip it into an envelope for your sister with one word written on the back: "Zebra."

Dentyne was the cinnamon one. It started as a breath-freshening gum made by American Chicle, the kind you chewed after lunch so nobody would know about the onions.

The ingredient list used to be short. An old Dentyne wrapper in the Australian War Memorial's collection lists gum base, sugar or dextrose, and flavor. That's about it.

The slide-out sleeve many people picture belongs to newer Dentyne. A federal court's description of Dentyne Ice packaging covers pellet gum in a plastic blister, sealed with foil and set inside a cardboard sleeve. You slide out the tray and push a piece through the foil.

So if your memory has the cinnamon but not the sleeve, both can be right. The flavor is the old part. The push-through packaging is the newer one.

The name was the giveaway. Dr. Edward E. Beeman formulated Beeman's Pepsin in the 1890s, and the original really did contain pepsin, a digestive enzyme. Today's gum no longer has any.

Then there's the legend. Aviators came to treat a stick of Beeman's as good luck before a flight, and the story is most often linked to test pilot Chuck Yeager. Enjoy it as a good story rather than a settled fact. The evidence is anecdotal, and it isn't a documented endorsement.

You can still chew one. The Gerrit J. Verburg Company, which revived several old gums, has also launched a sugar-free Beemans alongside its other vintage flavors.

If your sister's husband or your brother ever flew, hand him a pack before the next family dinner and ask whether he's heard the legend.

The three of them were the everyday gums: the ones in your mother's purse, the glove box, the dish by the register. They weren't treats so much as supplies, the gum you didn't have to ask for.

Here's a fact to drop on your sister: the first retail product ever scanned with a UPC barcode, the striped code on everything you buy, was a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit. It happened in Troy, Ohio, in 1974, and Mars, which owns Wrigley today, still tells that story.

It makes sense they'd grab that pack. Juicy Fruit is Wrigley's oldest brand.

Unlike Fruit Stripe, these never left. Mars still lists Juicy Fruit, Spearmint and Doublemint among its heritage brands.

The next time a cashier scans your groceries, listen for the beep. Then buy a pack of Juicy Fruit in the checkout lane and tell her where that sound began.

You remember the small cardboard box of candy-coated pellets that rattled when you shook it, the way you'd tip two into your palm and slide the box back in your pocket.

That box is gone from American stores now; Mondelez phased out U.S. sales, and testimony in a 2020 Trademark Trial and Appeal Board case put the end of the last U.S. product at March 2016.

Cross the border, though, and Chiclets is still sold there. Mondelez's Mexico site says the brand has been sold there for 95 years. If a trip to Mexico is on your calendar, or a friend is headed that way, put Chiclets on the list.

The pack itself was easy to describe. A 1941 Liberty magazine ad told readers to "Get Beech-Nut Gum in the yellow package," and Beech-Nut Peppermint was one of the flavors that came that way.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds a Beech-Nut chewing-gum shipping crate, a piece of the company's 20th-century gum business.

Open the Smithsonian's online collection on your phone tonight, search "Beech-Nut," and find the crate. Then ask your sister what color the pack was. If she says yellow right away, she remembers it the way the old ad described it.

Clorets made a bold promise. The maker's own page calls it the only gum with Actizol and chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants, there to deodorize your breath.

The catch is where you can buy it. In a 2016 trademark filing, the brand's owner acknowledged that no gum bearing the Clorets name was for sale in the United States.

If you're shopping online for a pack, check where the listing ships from and whether the label is in English. A pack of Clorets for sale here is almost certainly an import, and the ingredient panel will tell you whether it's the chlorophyll gum you remember.

Bonkers! came with an exclamation point. They were rectangular fruit chews with a tangy center, introduced by Nabisco, and they lasted until they were discontinued in the 1990s.

The comeback has been stuck ever since. Trademark records show Leaf Brands later obtained the rights to the Bonkers! name, and the brand has signaled a return more than once. A nationwide relaunch hasn't happened.

A listing that uses the name could be old stock, a small run, or a lookalike riding on the memory.

Before you click "buy," check three things: the maker named on the listing, a date on the package, and whether the photo shows a real pack or a scan of an old ad. If it's old stock, it belongs on a shelf with the Fruit Stripe pack, not in your mouth.

Is Certs a candy or a breath mint? The federal government has answered both ways, and in both rulings the sugar mattered.

A federal appeals court classified sugar-free Certs as an oral and dental hygiene product, while U.S. Customs classified sugar-containing Certs mints as candy.

So next time someone at lunch asks, read the roll in your purse. Sugar-free is the kind the court called a hygiene product. With sugar on the list, it's the kind Customs called candy.

You twisted the base, the color rose out of a plastic tube, and you drew it on the way your mother did. Then you ate it.

What you were eating was mostly sugar. A 2003 patent for edible candy makeup describes how such candy is made: dextrose, a simple sugar, or table sugar, mixed with food acids for tang, plus colors and flavors. The mix is pressed under pressure into a lipstick shape and set in a plastic holder.

Novelty makers still use pressed dextrose as the base for toy candies like this. One of them, Kidsmania, says on its own FAQ page that its novelty candies are made for children 3 and up.

If you're buying a tube for a granddaughter, check the age line on the package before it goes in her stocking. And buy one for yourself.

The boxes looked real because they were meant to. By the 1940s, candy-cigarette makers were closely copying the packaging of major cigarette brands, according to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which keeps an example.

You held one between two fingers, tapped it on the box, and felt very grown up.

The mood changed after the 1964 Surgeon General's report on smoking, when that resemblance started to worry people.

There's a reason it still might. A study of U.S. adolescents found that childhood use of candy cigarettes was associated with smoking later on. That's an association, not proof. It's still enough to keep them off a grandchild's Halloween list.

Enjoy the memory and skip the purchase. To show your sister, send her the museum's photo of an old pack.

First you wore them. Then you chewed them. That two-step joke still works on anyone under ten, and on most people over 60.

Tootsie Roll sells Wack-O-Wax Lips, made from refined food-grade wax with sugar, flavors and colors. A single cherry bag was $2.19 on Tootsie's online shop this fall, and prices change.

The whistle runs on the same logic. The Wowee Wax Whistle brand built its whole novelty on one order of events: play the whistle, then chew.

Neither is much of a snack. The wax is the toy, and the sugar is the reward for putting on a show.

That makes them a smart buy for one situation: the family picture. Hand a pair to everyone at the next holiday gathering, and take the photo before anyone gets to the chewing part.

Every strip left a little paper behind, because the dots never came off clean. You ate some paper. Everybody did.

The buttons outlived the company that made them famous. After NECCO's 2018 bankruptcy, Doscher's Candy Co. took over the brand and makes Candy Buttons today. Single packs started around $1.59 on its site this fall.

The flavors match the colors, three to a strip: pink is cherry, yellow is lemon, and the blue dots are sold as lime.

Text your sister "pink, yellow, blue" and nothing else, and see how fast "candy buttons" comes back. Then order two packs, mail her one, and eat the other on the phone together, paper and all.

Pixy Stix are still exactly what they were: flavored powdered sugar in a paper straw. You bit off the end, tipped your head back and poured.

Ferrara, which makes them, has called Pixy Stix a Halloween favorite "since 1959". That puts them on the earliest trick-or-treat runs many of you remember.

They're also easy to find. Walmart stocks them in small boxes and in the giant straws.

Around Halloween, the comparison worth making is simple. Small boxes split easily into handfuls for the bowl by your front door, so every child gets a few. One giant straw makes a single, memorable gift for one child.

For a while, Mary Jane looked finished. The peanut-butter-and-molasses taffy went down with NECCO, and the little chews vanished from candy aisles.

Then Atkinson Candy stepped in. The company announced it was bringing Mary Jane back and makes it today.

You can buy it by the tub straight from Atkinson. The current ingredient statement is posted on the product page.

Read it before you share. Peanut butter is right there in the description, so a tub isn't for a grandchild with a peanut allergy, or for a classroom party where you can't check.

For everyone else, buy the tub, taste one before you share, and keep the rest on hand for whenever someone could use something sweet.

Licorice gum. Clove gum.

Black Jack is the licorice-flavored stick gum, and it dates to the 1880s. Clove is a clove-spice stick gum.

Both fell away, and both came back. The Gerrit J. Verburg Company revived Black Jack and Clove and sells them today, along with other old flavors.

Gerrit also added sugar-free versions of Black Jack, Beemans, Clove and Teaberry. If you've cut back on sugar, that's the version to order.

It's worth ordering a pack of each, since this is a taste you can't get anywhere else. Hand your sister a stick of Clove without telling her which one it is, and watch her face.

The ritual came first. You held the flat bar in its wrapper, smacked it hard against something solid, and the taffy broke into bite-size pieces.

That ritual mattered so much that Bonomo Turkish Taffy built its return around it. The brand relaunched in 2010 "in its original smack-it, crack-it formula," and the company owns the "SMACK-IT CRACK-IT" trademark it uses on its packaging.

To do it right, keep the wrapper sealed so the pieces stay put. Hold the bar flat, bring it down against a hard surface in one firm smack, then open the wrapper and pick out the pieces.

Save it for the next family gathering, with the youngest grandchild watching. Say "smack it, crack it" out loud before you swing, then hand over the next bar for their turn.

If you buy only one candy for your sister this year, make it a roll of Necco Wafers. It's still made, it's inexpensive, it weighs almost nothing, and the moment she sees those pastel discs stacked in a roll, she'll know.

Spangler Candy makes Necco Wafers today, in Original and in a chocolate version.

A single roll runs about $1.47 at Walmart. Spangler's 24-roll tray works out to about $1.60 a roll.

So the tray doesn't save you money per roll. Buy it only if you're splitting rolls among cousins or filling a dozen stockings. For one sister, a couple of single rolls from the store do the job.

Then mail it. A roll fits in a padded envelope with room for a sticky note that says "Remember these?"