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organized a ceremony at which Marshall—who was, in a promotional flourish exquisitely unsuited to his laconic demeanor, known as the King of Hearts—unveiled a new slogan. (This was Necco’s effort to keep up with the times, and while I could appreciate the bid for free publicity, some of the more recent efforts had been less than titillating— FAX ME , for example.)
    Marshall was in a tizzy. He was wearing a lab coat with his name stitched above the breast pocket and a tie knotted a bit too tightly, and the lab coat fluttered behind him as he whisked around the corporate offices of Necco. He settled behind his desk, a desk littered with candy hearts and memos regarding candy hearts, and fixed me with a look of not-quite-concealed impatience. “Alright, here’s the story of how I got into the candy business,” he said, though I had not yet asked him how he got into the candy business.
    Marshall’s father, it turned out, had been a traffic cop in front of the Schrafft’s building. So Marshall landed himself a summer job in 1953 and stayed with the company for 25 years, working his way up to Executive Vice President/General Manager. He joined Necco in 1987 and was now, he reported, “in the twilight of a mediocre career.” I found this odd. Here was a man who could take an elevator down one flight and order an entire run of chocolatecovered turtles and take them home with him. This did not strike me as the prerogative of a mediocre career.
    Whatever his self-esteem issues, Marshall possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s confectionery past, which began in 1765, when an Irish immigrant named John Hannon established America’s first chocolate mill on the banks of the Neponset River in Dorchester. Marshall himself was born in Dorchester and used to walk by that factory every day. “You could almost taste the chocolate in the air,” he said. The earliest candy companies in Boston were roadside operations. They cooked stuff up in the kitchen and sold it out front. The proximity of the chocolate mill, two sugar refineries, not to mention a sizable population, made the city a confectionery hub. With the introduction of the steam engine, local companies began producing the first candy-making machines. Foremost among these was Oliver R. Chase’s lozenge cutter, which began producing the wafers later known as Neccos in 1847. They were a staple of the Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War. In 1901, Chase bought two other companies and dubbed his outfit the New England Confectionery Company, the world’s first candy conglomerate.
    The first half of the twentieth century was, Marshall assured me, Boston’s freak zenith. The city was home to 140 candy companies by 1950, with sales of $200 million per year. Necco’s Sky Bar—a slab of milk chocolate infused with four distinct fillings—was among the most popular bars on the East Coast. When World War II ended, all the New York papers ran stories reporting that the famous Sky Bar billboard in Times Square was finally illuminated again.
    The beginning of the end for Boston came with the rise of the national candy conglomerates: Hershey’s and Mars. They understood that distribution had changed. Mom-and-pop stores were on the wane. Manufacturers had to connect with the big chains. And they had to be more centrally located, so they could ship nationwide.
    Unable to compete with the candy giants, Necco flirted with insolvency during the sixties. The company’s execs realized they were going to have to grow to survive and began buying up struggling competitors. There was no shortage: Candy House Buttons, maker of those curious strips of colored candy dots on wax paper. Stark, Necco’s only competitor in the wafer and candy heart world, and producers of the old-school peanut butter taffy known as the Mary Jane. Great American Brands, best known for its Haviland chocolates. And, just last year, the venerable Clark Bar Company of Pittsburgh. What Necco had