In Honor of Halloween, the MLB Playoffs, and my upcoming trip to the dentist....

When I was a Freshman in High School, the Yankees won the World Series 4-2 over the Los Angeles Dodgers.  I was (and am) a Red Sox fan, but a lot of my friends were Yankees fans (I had different taste in friends back then) and also big-time Reggie Jackson fans.  We didn't talk about baseball much, obviously.  We hunted and were on bowling leagues and skipped school together, but we didn't talk about baseball.

I wanted nothing to do with the Yankees or Reggie Jackson, but the Reggie Bar is my all-time favorite candy bar.  It was just awesome- just a glob of carmel and nuts and chocolate; what a Take Five bar would be if they switched out the pretzels for nuts, maybe.  It was about as uncomplicated as you could get in a candy bar.  And it was plenty good enough for me to ignore the fact that Reggie Jackson was there on the package, in his Yankees uniform.  Great candy.

Around the same time as I noticed Reggie Bars, Twix were introduced in the United States (they had been introduced in Great Britain in the 1960s, but in the world before the internet, who knew?) and I thought they were amazing, too.  I eat one every once in a while now and I don't think they taste as good as they did thirty years ago; I wonder if they suffered the same fate as Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is considerably less fatty now than when I was eating it once or twice a year back in the 70s and imagining that I would live on it when I was an adult, or McDonald's apple pies, which used to have an awesome thick fried crust but are now slimmed down and contain more fruit- yuck.  Or maybe I just don't find candy bars as tasty as I did when I was a fat little kid.

Whatever.  Reggie bars were discontinued in 1981- interestingly enough, the year that the Dodgers turned the tables on the Yankees and beat them in the World Series, again four games to two.  I  am not sure I noticed- I don't remember feverishly looking for them in the two or three stores available to me in my home town.  Maybe the end of the Reggie bar was so traumatic I've blocked the memory.  In any case they weren't around very long and I've seen the wrappers- yes, just the wrappers- selling on eBay for anywhere from four to ten bucks each (or a signed one for $499.  I'm not kidding.)  Not going to buy a wrapper, and probably wouldn't buy a bar nowadays if they were rereleased because, as I noted above, companies can't leave recipies alone and they'd probably mess this one up too.

So here's to you, Reggie bar.  Never liked Reggie Jackson, always hated the Yankees, but this was a nice candy bar.  I wonder how many kids got them on Halloween and wish they'd kept the wrappers.