DO YOU REMEMBER…..HOUSE CALLS and JUJUBES?

Back in the day, many, many doctors, would actually come to your house. The doc would bring his little black bag with him. The bag contained the basics needed to check out, and sometimes work on patients. A stethoscope, a blood pressure monitor, and wooden tongue depressors were the staples of the bag.

A simple telephone call to the doctor’s office, would set an appointment at your house if you requested it. Today’s generation probably can’t imagine that any professional, would show up at your house, ready for duty, simply at your beck and call. If they would come to your residence, it would probably be at an impossibly inflated fee. If memory serves this writer correct, while there was an obvious premium for requesting a house visit, it really wasn’t too much more than the cost of a visit to the doctor’s office. Of course a house call would usually come with just the doctor. No cute nurse or assistant that would be tending to you at the office.

Members of my family, received attention at home for everything from a broken leg, to a sore throat. Even a stomach ache caused by too many jujubes, was not too unimportant for the family physician to turn down a “house call” request. And in some cases, you could pay the doc, with your “Bankamericard”, which was the original version of a “Visa” credit card, back in the fifties.

Just the mention of those little colorful hard and chewy candy pieces called jujubes, sets my mind scanning over a host of other candies of yesteryear. Remember “Good and Plenty” candies. For those that don’t, they were black and pink covered licorice pieces.

Another throwback memory of confections, is “Nik-L-Nip”. They were little wax bottles about two inches high, shaped like soda bottles, very close to “Coca-Cola” bottles in style. these little bottles were filled with what can bsaically be described as colored sugar water.

Candy cigarettes were also popular during the fifties and sixties, and were a big favorite of this writer’s. These little white peppermint-like sticks, purposely had a kind of loose powder coating that when blown on, would create a powdery “smoke-like” effect. Of course these candy cigarettes are nowhere to be found today. Today’s society rightly frowns on cigarette smoking of any kind for many reasons, and making a candy out of such a dangerous habit as tobacco smoking, is obviously a bad idea. Kids across the country, learned early, how to emulate adults by holding these sticks between their fingers, like they were Sinatra or somebody, but my friends and I did have fun with this indulgence.

Some of these confections from the past, may still be found with deep research on the internet, or by calling around to candy stores, but for the most part, these sweet pleaures are gone with the wind. I did recently, to my sweet surprise, stumble across “Flicks”, at my local supermarket. These are little drops of chocolate that come in a colorful foil covered cylindrical tube that opens at each end. These were immensely popular as a snack at the theater while watching a “flick”. So “Flicks” are back, for anybody ready to take a nostalgia trip back to their childhood days when they were watching Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.