Candy Mountain

The following is one of my favorite memories from the cottage. I will now post less frequently. Perhaps once every week or two. Enjoy

The Necessity of a Place:

“Thirty Years at the Water’s Edge”

By Bob Dentzman

    DRAFT MANUSCRIPT – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

Copyright © 2025 by Bob Dentzman. All rights reserved

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This is an unpublished work provided for review purposes only. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the

“The stories within these pages are my own. They are told to the best of my memory, though I recognize that memory is an imperfect lens. I have made every effort to ensure the integrity of the events recorded here; however, in some instances names have been changed and certain details altered to respect the privacy of others. Dialogue has been created from memory. While certain sequences have been compressed for the sake of the narrative. This is not a historical record, but a personal one.”

JOURNAL ENTRY 26: CANDY MOUNTAIN

It was a mid-July weekend. I decided to take on a small project Saturday morning. We had a beautiful old maple tree across from the porch. It deserved to be profiled. I decided circling it with a rock border was a good start.

I took a yardstick and circled the tree, using it like the hand of a clock. This gave me a nice arc. Using my sod shovel, I traced the arc. Step one was done. I had gathered softball- and cantaloupe-sized rocks from the gravel pit. These would do the job. I placed the rocks around the line I had traced. Then I shoveled topsoil into the ring up to the top of the stones. I repeated this process three times and had a nice elevated flower bed with a rock border.

I would spread some bark on top and plant some shade-tolerant plants—ferns, lily of the valley, maybe some ground cover. I had access to all these and would transplant them in the fall, the best time to divide perennials. I also thought about hostas. They’re shade-tolerant, but they would never survive. Locals called them “deer lettuce.” Plant them today, eaten to the ground by morning.

Project completed. Barb, Katie, and I decided to drive to Manistee, about twenty-five miles north of us. It’s on U.S. 31, which runs north along Lake Michigan through several small towns—Traverse City, Charlevoix—ending in Petoskey. This was a route we would occasionally take to Grandpa Rocky’s place. It was scenic but also forty-five minutes longer than our normal route.

Manistee has a rich history. It sits on the shores of Lake Michigan, with the Manistee River flowing into Manistee Lake and spilling into the big lake. In the mid-1800s, it was a bustling logging town. Ideal location: logs were cut, floated down the river into the lake, staged, and taken to one of the many sawmills in town. It was a lucrative business. In the mid-1800s, Manistee boasted more millionaires per capita than any city in the U.S. Today, many of the Victorian estates of the lumber barons are still standing.

As the lumber business faded, salt was discovered under the city. Manistee became known as “Salt City U.S.A.” Morton Salt, Martin Marietta, and Packaging Corporation of America are the big companies still operating there. More millionaires were made.

The town also had a foundry, Manistee Iron Works, now closed. With all this industry, labor was needed. Manistee was cut in two by the highway. On the east side were the factories and row houses for common labor. On the west side, huge Victorian estates were built, along with upscale homes along the shore of Lake Michigan. The highway was the line of demarcation.

Today tourism is a primary industry in Manistee. They have a beautiful one-way street running through town with shops, restaurants, and several antique stores. It also has the Ramsdell Theater, built in 1903—a reminder of the town’s heyday and the cultural scene of the affluent.

This was our destination. There was a high-end shoe store, Snyders, that Barb liked. When I joked she was approaching Imelda Marcos territory with her shoe collection, she countered with how many fishing rods I owned. She had a point. I encouraged her to buy the shoes she wanted.

With the new shoes safely in the car, we went to our favorite antique shop. Each shop has booths where local collectors stage their wares in exchange for a commission paid to the shop on each sale. At this particular shop, we’d found treasures before.

Barb would typically look for Lu-Ray dishes—pastel-colored dishware from the 1950s that fit our cottage’s theme perfectly. We could always count on finding a few new pieces.

We had been searching for a 1950s-style dining table—colorful Formica top, chrome legs and trim. They came in a wide range of colors. Matching chairs had vinyl seats and backs. Both our families had them when we were growing up.

We had been looking for some time but never found one that was “just right” or in our price range. On this day, we got lucky. The store operator said she knew of a couple that had one for sale. She called them. They still had it and were eager to sell. We got the address.

It was one of the row houses. When we arrived, we were met by the husband. He had just been laid off. The wife was at work. Three kids watched us from inside the house.

“It’s in the basement. Follow me,” he said.

When we got to the basement, wet clothes were hung on a line from the exposed beams, and piles of wet clothes sat on tables or in laundry baskets.

“Our dryer broke,” he explained.

The table was just what we were looking for—gray and white Formica with pink speckles. There were four matching chairs.

“How much are you asking?”

“One seventy-five,” he said. “I need to buy a dryer and I need to sell this quickly.”

Barb and I looked closer. It wasn’t exactly what we wanted because we wanted six chairs, but it was close. We said, “We’ll think about it,” and left.

When we got a block away, I said, “Let’s buy it.” Barb agreed, and we went back.

We knocked on the door. The husband answered.

“We’ve decided to buy the table and chairs on one condition,” I said. “The price is two twenty-five.” Fifty dollars more than he was asking.

We said at one seventy-five he was giving the set away. We wanted to be fair and figured the money meant more to him than us.

The deal was struck. He was delighted.

We said we wished it had two more chairs. He said, “Well, the lady next door has them.” He called her and she said she’d be happy to sell the pair for fifty dollars.

Deal done. We now had our table and chairs for the grand total of two seventy-five. This was less than what we’d seen for similar sets.

As we were leaving, he stepped outside and saw Katie in the car. He asked, “Have you been to Candy Mountain?” He saw our blank look and added, “It’s the best candy place. You have to go.”

Finding it was a bit of a challenge. The directions took us into a residential area of row houses. We actually drove by it twice. Candy Mountain was a two-story building sided with green asphalt shingles. There was a small sign in the window and one nailed to the outside wall. We were a bit apprehensive but decided to go in.

When we opened the door, it was like Alice through the looking glass. We stopped and stared. The interior was old, with twelve-foot ceilings. Disney character figurines and posters lined the walls. There was an old Felix the Cat clock.

Katie just stared at the collection of Disney characters. Disney World was her most favorite place. She was taking all this in.

But what truly fascinated us—Barb and me particularly—was that all the candy was retro from the 1950s and ’60s. The candy of our childhood. Nothing after the late ’60s was stocked.

The store had shelves along two walls with a set of shelves dividing the room like a boulevard. There was a supply of small bags along the way. And the candy: Mary Janes, Squirrel Nut Chews, wax lips, Nickel Nips, Clark bars, Zero bars, Pixie Stix, jawbreakers, bubble gum cigars, Sugar Daddies, Slo Pokes, little packages of cinnamon hearts, Chum Gum, Blow Pops, Charleston Chews, root beer barrels, Necco wafers, and candy cigarettes. If you could name it, they had it.

I was a candy connoisseur. My Grampa Walt had a grocery store in the little town where I grew up—Walt’s Grocery. I had free rein to take what I wanted. This is the reason I have a mouth full of fillings. I would often accompany my grandpa to the wholesale house where he bought his supplies. I would tell him which candies were the kids’ favorites—mine too.

Katie filled her bag carefully, asking about each candy. “What’s this one, Dad?” She’d never heard of most of them—they were from before her time, candies Barb and I had grown up with. We were sharing our past with her, one Mary Jane at a time.

In addition to the penny candy, they also made chocolate specialties: milk and dark chocolate seafoam, turtles—those caramel and pecan treats coated with chocolate—all types of fudge, and you could special order chocolate Easter bunnies. What a place. We must have been there an hour, filling little sacks with candy.

When we went to pay for our bounty, I noticed behind the counter on the wall a pigeonhole cabinet like you would see in an old hotel where room keys and messages were held. I noticed several of the pigeonholes had envelopes.

I asked, “What are those?”

The owner told me each envelope had a neighborhood kid’s name on it. The parents would put money in the envelope and that would be the child’s candy allowance. They could come into the store after school or on weekends when they were out playing and get their candy fix. No parent needed. It was all prepaid.

Man, how I love small Midwest towns.

When we went to pay, the bigger items had prices, but the penny candy in the bags was put on a scale and we were charged by weight. We had truly “scaled” Candy Mountain.

In the years that followed, we often visited the mountain. Several times we special ordered Easter bunnies. When Barb asked the price, the owner said, “Between five and fifty dollars.” They were custom made. They would be the featured prize of the Easter egg hunt at the cottage.

Easter morning, all would be hidden, but the intense effort was to find the chocolate bunny. When it was found, the ears were always the first to go. Katie or Barb could not resist. Then we shared. We shared this special place with many of Katie’s friends who would join her at the cottage. I thought about ordering an “ears down” bunny just for a joke, but figured that would be mean.

We enthusiastically shared our find with lake friends who had never heard of it.

But the day wasn’t finished. We had yet to have dinner. Just down the street on the corner, we saw a place called the Painted Lady Saloon. It was a bar that served food and originally served the workers from the nearby factories. We went in. It was old, cozy, and had a nice feel to it.

We later learned it was the oldest bar in Manistee, over 120 years old. It served good food, specializing in broasted chicken and homemade soups. My favorite is the chicken pot pie soup. Fridays they have the traditional fish fry. Lots of Catholics in this little town.

It was once a working man’s bar. Drinks were reasonable. The draft beer was poured liberally. One favorite drinking pastime involved Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Under the bottle cap of the longnecks was a particular card from the deck of fifty-two. To settle who paid for the round, the cap was turned over revealing the card. Low card paid.

There was a picture on the mirror of two old-timers drinking, with one saying, “Larry, if we don’t stop drinking, in ten years we’ll look like those two drunks.” His buddy Bill replied, “Larry, you’re looking in the mirror, you dumbass.”

Our trip to Manistee was an eventful Saturday in July. We would go back many times over the years and still visit the Painted Lady. Sadly, Candy Mountain closed in the early 2000s. We miss it still.

What we did not know at that time was that in the years to come, the little town of Manistee would become an even more special place to the Dentzman family.