Today in 1947, the start of a big moment in the history of sweets: it would eventually become known as the Candy Strike.
Candy shops in Canada had been selling chocolate bars for a nickel.
But, because of inflation, they decided to raise those prices to eight cents a bar.
That meant that some of the kids who had brought a nickel to their local candy shops had to walk out chocolate-free.
They included some kids who visited a place called the Wigwam Cafe in Vancouver, British Columbia.
But these kids weren’t going to take a 60 percent price increase lying down.
They decided to take the issue to the streets!
These youngsters made some signs and started picketing the cafe, singing a song that went “We want a 5 cent chocolate bar/8 cents is going too darn far.”
The local news couldn’t pass up the story.
They wrote articles about the protesters, and took a photo of their picketing.
When the photo showed up in the papers in other parts of the country, children in other cities said, hey, these Vancouver kids are onto something!
So they took to the streets to protest the eight cent candy bar too.
They crowded into candy shops to ask about chocolate prices.
They blared bugles outside the Parliament building in Ottawa.
Some even walked out of classes!
And thousands of them signed cards promising that they wouldn’t buy any candy until something was done about the prices.
(Toy and gum makers didn’t mind the extra money going toward their products.)
Candy makers took out ads trying to justify the price increases.
They said they had to cover the rising costs of labor and raw materials.
But sales still slumped.
At least until a newspaper article in May included a claim from an anonymous source that the protests were no longer a spontaneous youth movement, but a well coordinated campaign by Canadian Communists!
This was in the early days of the Cold War, so any charge that the Reds were behind any kind of public agitation was very scary stuff to a lot of people.
Soon enough, the candy strike drew to a close, but not before the price of a candy bar fell to seven cents.
Literally change.
April is National Poetry Month.
Poems can take lots of different forms, such as Fibonacci Poetry.
Just like the math sequence in which each new number is the sum of the previous two, the syllables in each line of a Fibonacci poem add up to the number of syllables in the previous two.
Once you get past line eight or so it gets tricky,
Historicist: The Candy Bar Strike (Torontoist)
Fibonacci Poetry (or The Fib): Poetic Forms (Writers Digest)
