Farewell to the exalted Salted Nut Roll...

The exalted Salted Nut Roll (Wikipedia image)

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/11-07-26

Yes, these are troubled — and troubling — times. It seems like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding roughshod through the world again.

 

You remember them, right? Conquest. War. Famine. Death. Some accounts also say one of the horses was Pestilence which, as everyone knows, is another word for “disease.” Anyway, if you see them coming, better step aside.  A lot of men didn’t and a lot of men died. Women too.

 

They’ve been around a long time. Check your Bible. It will be a revelation.

 

I don’t usually write political commentary on this feature page. It belongs on the opinion page. But times are so dour now with wars breaking out all over the place, disease rampant, cost of living and driving rising precipitously, the recent election and (brace yourself) the end of the Salted Nut Roll imminent, I must wade in.

 

How about that. The Pearson candy company of Minnesota has announced it is no longer going to produce the Salted Nut Roll, the greatest candy bar in history. Check your Bible again. Adam loved them but Eve preferred apples.

 

Oh, there are other good candy bars — Baby Ruth (at one time my favorite), Butterfingers, Snickers, Mounds, Hershey, but once you’ve sampled a Salted Nut Roll nothing compares.

 

I stumbled upon them by accident. I had been plunking down a nickel and getting Baby Ruths for much of my childhood. Kids all thought they were named after Babe Ruth, the famous baseball player, but they weren’t. They were named after the daughter of former U.S. President Grover Cleveland whose name was Ruth. Thanks a lot, Google. 

 

Then, when I was about 12, I discovered the Salted Nut Roll when my bicycle broke down in western Duluth on a journey — it was a journey from where I lived — to the Duluth Zoo (now called Lake Superior Zoo).

 

It was the longest foray from the West End (now Lincoln Park), where we lived, I’d ever taken on my heavy single-speed-fat-tire bike. A couple of friends and I pumped the five or so miles to the zoo but on the return something on my bike gave out in West Duluth (Now called Spirit Valley) about half way home and I was stuck. I pushed into an old filling station/car repair shop to call home for help. My friends moved on but I waited with my broken bike for my older brother to drive the family car out to get me and the bike.

 

I was tired and hungry, lonesome and sorry, especially hungry. The old gas station where I waited didn’t have much to choose from — a few candy bars I wasn’t familiar with or didn’t like. I guess I had a nickel or a dime (that’s what candy bars cost then) so I chose this long, narrow, brown candy bar with peanuts all over it. I’d rather have had a chocolate Baby Ruth, but this would have to do. After one bite of the peanut bar my mind raced through my past — what have I been missing? Chomping away, I liked it better with each bite. I was sold. Sold for life on the Salted Nut Roll.

 

I’m not a big candy man now, but even recently I’ve indulged in a few Salted Nut Rolls I spotted in a bin at a supermarket before they disappeared. There are some things you think will last forever, like Oldsmobiles, and when they disappear, you’re shocked. I’m shocked at the demise of the Salted Nut Roll.

 

Let me include a word about my second-favorite candy bar, the Baby Ruth. As stated above, we all thought it was named after baseball’s Babe Ruth and associated it with him. He was still alive when I was a child, but I was aware that many years before he'd come to Duluth.

The baseball great appeared on the stage of the old Lyric Theater, located in what we now call the Lyric Block in downtown Duluth. Records show the place was packed with boys who idolized Ruth. I remember the Lyric well and I did see “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” there, but he was no Babe Ruth.

 

So now here we are, many decades after I first tasted a Salted Nut Roll, still enjoying them and learning that they will be no more. At this age, I’m starting to think that we have that in common.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org. 

Pop music in the past different from today ...

 

Elvis (pictured in 1956)
changed everything in the world of pop culture.

Written By Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/10-132026

Yup, I’m a geezer. Look at the picture that runs with this column: gray hair (what’s left of it), white beard, other signs of geezerhood. Heck, I was born at the end of the Great Depression and that describes how I feel when I count all the years I’ve racked up.

 

Got that? One of the sure signs of what polite people call “aging” is a person’s difficulty adapting to changing times. 

 

Take “popular” music. Please, take off all of the pop music on the radio and elsewhere in this digital age. Rap? Take it all away. Turn off the radio or maybe go over to country: (“I learn’t my education out behind the barn. I ain’t foolin,’ no sireee, passed each examination out behind the barn, but it almost made a wreck of me, out behind the barn.”)

 

When I look back on my long life I sometimes reflect on the pop music of my youth in the 1950s. Songs like, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” It told the story of a person passing a pet shop and wondering how much it would cost to buy the cute little puppy on display.

 

The song goes on to identify the dog as “the one with the waggly tail.” Can you picture it? What a lyric. Maybe you’ve caught on as a garbage truck driver’s protege and that music comes out on the dashboard radio between trash-hauling stops. Makes your day.

 

Moving on, this might have sounded risqué when you first heard it on 1950s radio, but not to worry. The song was titled “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” and that “naughty lady” was a newborn baby girl “So delightful to hold, the naughty lady of Shady Lane…is only nine days old.” How inspiring for the youth of my generation, except for a few who were HAVING naughty babies and getting kicked out of high school for it.

 

And how better to describe true love than this: “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.” Pizza was just being introduced here at that time causing some confusion among older radio listeners, but we teens knew there was no better way to express love than to eat cheese and pepperoni with a main squeeze.

 

Hey, we can’t ignore the polka folk, so many of them, um, overweight, it seemed. The “Too Fat Polka” warned “I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me.” I’m not sure if that number was performed by a popular polka group called “The Six Fat Dutchman,” or maybe it was popular polka performer “Whoopee’ John Wilfhardt (get it?).

 

Then suddenly, in 1955 a guitar-strumming 21-year-old Southern boy with a strange name showed up from down at the end of Lonely Street by the Heartbreak Hotel.

 

Elvis changed everything in the world of pop culture. No more doggies in the window. Gotta rock, rock, rock around the clock, as Bill Haley and the Comets put it at the time. Could the Beatles be far behind?

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.