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local color affixed to the top of a building filled with software companies. It began to dawn on me, in other words, that Boston, my adopted city, had something of an untold freak history.
    When I called Squirrel Nut to find out what had happened, a friendly man named Bob Stengal answered the phone. He explained that he had been the general manager of Squirrel Nut Brands since 1970, but that he no longer served in that capacity because the company had been bought out and relocated to Texas, of all places, and though he wished the new owners the best of luck, you could tell that the whole scenario bummed him out.
    The Squirrel Nut Zippers are perhaps best known these days as a band that played neoflapper music, music I spent several years trying quite hard (and never quite successfully) to enjoy. The original Squirrel Nut Zipper is a caramel nut chew, which has been in production since 1888. “We made one of the best taffies in the industry,” Bob told me. “It chewed beautifully. A good taffy should be soft enough to pull without snapping. Why, you could pull ours forever.”
    I myself could attest to this. I had eaten several thousand Nut Zippers, because my optometrist stocked them in his candy bowl, meaning I ate twelve to fifteen during the course of an average visit, more if he had to replace my nose pads.
    Before signing on with Squirrel Nut, Bob had been a shortening salesman, an occupation I hadn’t realized existed previous to our discussion, but which, nonetheless, lent him a rather intimate acquaintance with the city’s candyscape. Back in the fifties, he told me, four factories had operated near the old Coast Guard station, off Atlantic Avenue downtown—Royal, Cole, Haviland, and Liberty—pumping the smell of chocolate over the North End all day long. Main Street in Cambridge was known as Confectioner’s Row. The entire street was candy makers: James O. Welch (Junior Mints), Jack Smiley (hard candies), Graylock Confection (Tweet), Dagget (chocolates), Fox-Cross (Charleston Chew). One by one, these companies fell on hard times. The managers would call Stengal to discuss their problems. Should they sell out? Should they relocate? Pretty soon Squirrel Nut was the last independent, family-owned candy company in Boston.
    I decided to visit Bob at his home, in Concord. He was a trim fellow, with neatly cropped white hair and a sweet, rabbity face. He showed me a bunch of memorabilia from his years with the company: awards, pictures of him with the owners, trade show programs going yellow at the edges. “I guess I was in denial right until they moved,” Bob said. “I didn’t empty my desk until two weeks before they shut the place down. By the end, I didn’t even have a desk. I was balancing a pad on my knee to take notes. They’d shut the utilities off, so it was dark. I remember I went up to the fourth floor of the factory and there was this echo. All the machines were gone. And I realized: this is just a shell now. Because, you know, when the factory was running, every floor had its own sounds. And when you were on the first floor, you could hear them all together, all those machines and people. It was like an orchestra.”
    You don’t have to be a genius to see how a guy like Bob might shake me up. All that freak, all that loss.
    But what I really needed was what little Charlie Bucket needed: to get myself inside a factory. I called over to Necco and got patched through to Walter Marshall, Vice President of Corporate Planning/Logistics, which translates as the Guy Who Has to Deal with All the Media Hassles, of whom I was hardly the most pressing. On the day I visited him, Marshall was anticipating a visit from Martha Stewart, the prescandal Martha, who wanted to talk with him about what had become Necco’s most popular product, the Conversation Heart.
    These are the little colored hearts that flood the market at Valentine’s and carry messages such as KISS ME and LOVER BOY . Every year, Necco