This reminds me of the old candy machines on the NYC subway when I was a kid. They were obviously pre-war. They didn’t rely on electrical power. If you put in a coin, you had to turn a knob or lever that would push your coin through the mechanism and then drive the gum or candy onto the slide. They always sold unusual brands, a lot like the Holloway stuff in movie theaters.
You can still get a lot of retro candies, even today. There used to be a one cent candy story in the West Village. My parents would give my sister and me a dime’s worth of pennies and we’d buy weird stuff like Mary Janes and Bits o’Honey. My mother would wax nostalgic. This was the candy of her youth. Maybe ten years ago my sister took me to a bulk candy store on the Lower East Side. They sold big bags of candy at good prices and had all sorts of stuff I vaguely remembered from when.
