by Ted Sherman

Created on: April 03, 2009   Last Updated: April 10, 2009

Not too many kids today, while enjoying the sweet, crunchy taste of jelly beans, ever stop to wonder how the little candies got their start. However, just to satisfy any curiosoty, jelly beans are said to have originated in the Middle East about ten centuries ago. Thus their early name of Turkish delights when they made their way westward in the 19th Century. They were small nougats with hard sugar coatings outside and soft citrus jelly inside, and came in all kinds of shapes, incuding square and oval.

Other versions indicate that the candy as it is shaped now was concocted by Christian elders in Germany. The little oval candy eggs were intended to indicate fertility and homage to the Holy Family.

Jelly eggs eventually became popular as gifts and decorations during Easter seasons, and eventually were associated with the most fertile of animals, the rabbit. The first time they appeared as regular manufactured products in America was during the 1860s, when families were encouraged to send jelly beans to troops fighting the Civil War.

Of course, nobody really knows when the first jelly bean appeared on the candy scene, but I can cite a fairly accurate moment in time when I discovered the tasty little delights. It was the time of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. I was age six, and a year after my young dad died, I was taken to a charity boarding school for fatherless boys.

I was desperately homesick, and the worst of it was being uprooted from my own private bedroom to be in a hospital-like dormatory every night with 30 other boys. It also took me awhile to adjust to the regimentation of the school, and at first, there were few moments of what could have been a typical boy's happy times.

However, there was a weekly event when I could look forward to something good. I was permitted off the school grounds for four hours every Sunday to visit my mother in her fourth-floor walk-up room.

She was on relief, as welfare was called in those days, and in addition to the 15 cents she could spare for my carfare (streetcar tokens were 7.5 cents per ride) she gave me a weekly allowance of a dime.

Following my Sunday visits, and after I got off the streetcar near the school's entrance, I'd go into a nearby little mom and pop candy store. My big moment was when I could invest that dime in an entire pound of jelly beans.

I nursed that big bag of candy throughout the week, slowly savoring four or five pieces at a time whenever I felt the need to reach into my secret stash; marching to classes, after a meal, on the playground and just before going to sleep at night.

Although today, they cost considerably more than ten cents a pound, I still buy jelly beans, and they give me some of the same satisfying emotions they did so many years ago. I find them most soothing while driving, during flights, working on my computer, watching television, at the movies and during my morning hikes. There are many other situations where I can enjoy the sweet tranquility of the wonderful treat and the memories they bring back.

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