Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

Hello lovers of all things sensual! I’m reheating a very old piece, one of the first from the old tumblr blog. A lot’s changed since then. I’m no longer quite as crazy for Clark bars. I haven’t even had or seen one for quite some time now. I’m pretty sure you can still find ’em but I only shop at the DG and Wawa now, neither of which carry these. I’ll have to look around. I used to go to Dollar Tree a lot, until I realized that almost all of it wasn’t worth even a buck. But they did have Clark bars, and a few things are good buys there… Next time I’m in town I’ll have to check it out. After rereading this I’m kinda hungry for one now! Or two.

One time a friend from the old blog brought me a whole box of ’em, which I do recall crushing in just a few days… I had lots of great gifts while I was working for the O’s and got to be friends with lots of blog folks and coworkers, even fans. You recognized the regulars, for better or worse. Best was this single mom with a very cute 7-8 year old daughter, both huge O’s fans for real, knew stats and standings, etc. They’d always want to take a photo with us ushers and the kid, the kid did at least. Mom went along with anything this gal wanted when they were at the yard. One Sunday they give me the gift of a framed photo of me and the girl, whose name I’ve sadly forgotten now. What a nice gesture! And it was a great photo too! Even I don’t look too goofy in it! I still have it and will treasure it always. That kind of niceness more than made up for the vomit-soaked student nights when we’d have to eject literally hundreds of allegedly impaired teens regularly.

Ahh, memories! I really enjoyed my 5 years working there a lot. Great coworkers especially, though a few were jerks. Usually in entertaining ways though, so still fun. We had a real family vibe going up in our sections, the entire 3rd base side upper deck. There was a mom and daughter that both worked up there, both very very nice, the daughter a hot young blond who was a baseball junkie too and really knew about certain players because she was in love with several of them. Chris Davis, Manny Machado, and especially Jonathan Schoop. Once some of Schoop’s cousins from Aruba were up in our section and I though she was gonna die! So excited! They couldn’t believe this little white girl was that big a fan of their boy!

It was always hilarious hearing her talk about her favorites. She’d blush and get all nervous… She was practically orgasmic whenever one of them did something good, and that was pretty often for a while there. Davis hit over 60 dongs one year! Not gonna make the obvious joke there, so you figure it out. I spent most of my free time before and even during games just yakking with Allison and her mom and anyone else that crossed my path. I was always paired up in my sections with someone real nice, aside from the first year, when an old timer who was almost homeless showed me the ropes and did a great job of it too. When I asked why he wasn’t around the next spring they said they’d gotten complaints about his odor, which was bullshit, but he did have some idiosyncrasies… He knew where to get good coffee before opening day games cheap, that’s all I know, and that ain’t easy.

As a new employee, opening day is a fucking nightmare! It’s like 48,000 people! All happy, all impatient, all there at the same time, so early that traffic is bad hours before it needs to be. They seem to want to be in a long line, like that’s part of the opening day experience. It’s overwhelming to anyone that sees this mess though. I mean, it’s just mayhem! Kids running wild, moms and dads not caring, everyone baking in the sun if it’s hot. Actually opening day is often very cold. That first one for me was below freezing, which made homeless Joe’s coffee-finding abilities that much more important.

That’s a day I’ll never forget! By the time we were done helping out at the gates (a necessity every time the crowds are big) and up at our actual posts we felt like we’d run a marathon! But we were well caffeinated thanks to Joe! I learned an awful lot that day, the first of several hundred I’d spend in what became my happy place, which just happened to be one of the finest ballparks in existence. Oriole Park At Camden Yards is the official name, or OPACY, but we all just called it “the yard”, which I thought was kinda cool.

Another favorite person became a friend for a while, this guy Mac, a real B-more veteran with tales to tell, a very knowledgeable guy , about baseball yes, but much more too, though not music. He once gifted me a hand-drawn. personalized cartoon, in color, done by the local paper’s sports illustrator, last name Ricigliano, referred to as Ricig by most. It has my name on it, or at least my screen name, the claudecat thing. Best part was that Mac gave it to me in this mailing tube from like 1947, with the canceled postage to prove it! I like that almost as much as the cartoon thing, now framed. Hey, I can post it here! Cool!

Oh man… this all was just supposed to be the preamble to the Clark bar piece! Y’know what? I’m leaving it! I’ll just reword the title and it’ll be fine! And now for the thrilling conclusion to today’s two part episode, the dessert one might say! I leave you in the capable yet still confused hands of the 2014 version of me, at the time a voracious consumer of the Clark bar, about which you’ll be learning everything you never wanted to know!

Both of my regular readers will know by now that I’m a connoisseur of junk food. I’ve done pieces on Krispy Kreme donuts, Cracker Jack, malted milk, cheesesteaks at Camden Yards, my all time favorite pizza place, and Vanilla Coke. I have barely scratched the surface of my enthusiasm for this kind of food, so when the Orioles baseball gets hard to take, you can expect me to write about yet another of my unhealthy objects of caloric affection. Today’s subject is the Clark bar. Most people have seen one, but I understand that they’re difficult to find these days. This has long been my favorite candy bar. Not too different from a Butterfinger or 5th Avenue bar, it’s a chocolate covered, peanut butter “honeycomb” in the center, brown log of deliciousness. I like all three of these candy bars, but to me the Clark bar has by far the superior quality chocolate, and the peanut buttery crispiness of its center is without equal, at least when you get a nice fresh one. Not so much any more, but in the past I’d occasionally get one where the center became sorta chewy. Still great tasting, but a lot of the allure here is in the texture of the center, which today seems to be more reliably of the melt in your mouth yet crispy nature that a good Clark bar has always had.

The Clark bar has an interesting history. First made in 1917 as the namesake product of the D.L. Clark company of Pittsburgh, PA, which itself began business in 1886, it’s been a staple of candy counters for a long long time. The Clark company also made such items as the Zagnut bar and Teaberry and Clove gums over the years, as well as several variations of the Clark bar itself, including coconut, dark chocolate, and even a mint version. None of these have ever been huge sellers, but the company soldiered on profitably for decades, the Clark bar remaining the most popular offering. The gum part of the business splintered off at some point, so the focus all along has been pretty much this one delicious candy bar that is still available, using the original recipe for the most part, to this day.

The D.L. Clarke company was eventually bought out in 1955 by Beatrice Foods, one of those giant corporate entities that’s never been known for making any one thing, mainly just absorbing other brands as diverse as Avis Rent A Car, Playtex, Shedd’s, Tropicana, and Good & Plenty. Yeah, one of those. The Beatrice Foods era brought little if any change to the day to day operations at the Pittsburgh factory or to the products, though it was during this time that many of the Clark bar varieties mentioned above were tried and ultimately failed. Always soldiering on, the brand and factory changed hands a few more times beginning in 1983, eventually settling into the hands of NECCO, aka the New England Confectionery Company, which itself is now owned by some other gigantic mega-corporation called American Capital. Best I can tell, the factory in Pittsburgh, with its iconic and familiar sign, is no longer operational, which is a shame. In my research for this piece I came across lots of fond memories of people whose parents or other relatives once worked there and it sounds like folks genuinely loved the company, and the sign was a local landmark now lost. Corporate America and the death of small manufacturing… sigh…

But the good news is that you can still enjoy a Clark bar if you can find one, which has become easier in recent years, at least where I am. In fact, they may be better than they’ve been for a while, as they now use real chocolate instead of whatever they used before. Hard facts are difficult to find but best I can tell, sometime during the Beatrice era they started cutting corners a bit and the chocolate became not “real”. In fact, if you go way back, it seems that the Clark bar at one time had some kind of gooey or chewy center within the crispiness of the peanut butter honeycomb stuff too, but that’s way before my experience. Anyway, the point is that today’s Clark bar is really really great (and you almost never get a bad chewy one either) if you can find one. I regularly get ‘em at my local Dollar Tree, but I’ve seen ’em at every Cracker Barrel I’ve been to, some Big Lots stores, many Walmarts, a few Targets, the Rutter’s convenience stores in Pennsylvania, and even in oddball places like Best Buy stores. They’re out there, just waiting to enter your tummy. They even come as “bites” I’m led to believe, though I’ve yet to see those.

I guess I haven’t actually gone into detail as to the eating experience yet, so here we go. First off, the chocolate coating is better than most candy bars, and by a wide margin. It will melt on your hands, which is good. The peanut butter honeycomb center is the best part though. It’s crispy yet melts in your mouth in a delightful way, not as dense and artificial as a Butterfinger, and with a better flavor than a 5th Avenue. The proportion of melty chocolate to center is perfect too. Every bite offers both of these tastes and textures. Comparing the Clark bar eating experience to something like, say, a Snickers or Milky Way is like night and day. Those two both have waxy chocolate that barely melts, and requires chewing to break down, to say nothing of what’s underneath, which, while not bad, isn’t even close to being as great as what makes up the center of a Clark bar. It’s apples and oranges I know, but the point is that the chocolate is a whole lot better in a Clark bar.

To digress briefly, some of the old-timey candy bars are a real letdown when you taste one after many many years. The Zero bar is not all that great. Zagnuts are OK I guess, but not as good as I remember. Sky Bars (the one with the 4-5 segments, each with a different filling) are horrible. Only the Clark bar for me has, if anything, improved over the years, staying true to itself and getting only better in consistency (in all the word’s senses) and quality of chocolate. I do wish they’d bring back some of the candy bars I used to love as a kid though. Remember the Milkshake bar? Caravelle? Powerhouse? Even the more recently retired Mars bar (American version with the whole almonds on top) was pretty great.

And writing “American version” just now reminds me… It’s been years since I’ve been to Canada, but I was highly impressed by the candy bar assortment and quality there, almost all made by Cadbury, which is superior chocolate to Hershey after all. They had this one twisty chocolate-coated caramel one that I really remember loving. We have a dwindling number of interesting candy bars here in the US, as, like with all products, everything gets boiled down to 26 variations of one brand name. I’d rather have the 100 Grand bar stick around than see “Milky Way Chewy Extreme, with Power Pebbles (crisped rice)” appear. Once again I have veered off course. Try a Clark bar today if you haven’t ever or for a long time. There. That kept me from thinking about baseball for a whole half an hour.

May 30th, 2014 2:29am