Wax lips nostalgic: Nothing tastes as sweet as a beloved childhood treat

Sugar. Corn syrup. Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.

They don't sound like the stuff of memories, but mold them into a Charleston Chew and suddenly I'm 8 years old and on a road trip, fighting with my little brother over who got a bigger piece of the chocolate-nougat confection as my dad drives with the windows open and tries to distract us by playing the license-plate game.

There's hot sun on the vinyl seats; news radio blaring; and my dad swears he's just seen a plate for "Missouri," which means he has all the M states.

Flavors take you back. Everyone knows that. But what I didn't know was that those teeth-killing Chews as well as old-style Skybars, wax lips and bubble-gum cigarettes are all still being made and can be bought online.

Of course — the Internet.

"A lot of these are not available nationwide. They're available in pockets here and pockets there, and you really have to look for them," says Colleen Chapin, founder of Hometown Favorites, whose site, www.hometownfavorites.com, sells old-style candy as well as hard-to-find foodstuffs like Boo Berry cereal.

Her business, which she started in 1996, went online in 1998 and ballooned as the Internet took off. A surprising number of people, it seems, needed a sugared nostalgia fix.

A mother of five, Chapin was looking for work she could do at home. But the business soon outgrew her West Palm Beach, Fla., house. It's now based in Virginia Beach, Va., where it rakes in $2 million a year in gross revenue. She says it has been profitable from the start by keeping stocks low initially and growing over time.

The candy aisle includes jelly Chuckles, violet-scented gum and those tiny wax bottles filled with fruit juice.

"A lot of times you don't realize they exist anymore because you don't see them on the shelf and they're kind of out of your mind, until you come across a site like ours and you say, 'Aaaa!, I haven't seen that wrapper in 20 years!' "

For Chapin, it all started with Wisconsin Candy Raisins, which she couldn't find when she moved south to Florida. "They're only available in Wisconsin, they're only sold in Wisconsin and I was having my sisters ship them down to me as I needed fixes all the time," she says.

She soon noticed that "everyone in Florida is from someplace else, so everybody has something that they were looking for that they remembered: Bre'r Rabbit Molasses or My-T-Fine Pudding or something like that."

A business was born.

Nowadays, customers snap up the party boxes of candy representing different decades — Flying Saucers and BB Bats in the '60s box, for example, Atomic Fireballs and Pixy Stix in the '80s box.

"That thing just blows them all away," she says. "You can open it up in a room full of people, and everyone is going to have a story: 'I remember this when I grew up,' and: 'I used to use Necco wafers when we played communion,' and: 'I used to share the Skybar in the movies.' Everybody has a story about those things."