Twinkies shake my world

Say it isn’t so.

The company that produces Hostess Twinkies is going to be liquidated.

I cannot tell you the last time I bought Twinkies. I am sure it has been a good long while. But it seems like yesterday that they formed part of my childhood and my introduction to our market economy.

While I was plugging holes in my Whitman albums, the coins I didn’t need to keep I spent for things like Twinkies, soda pop and packs of baseball cards.

My first memory of the price of a two-pack of Twinkies is 12 cents. An old fashioned ice cream soda at a real drug store soda fountain was 10 cents and a pack of baseball cards with a stick of that terrible gum was a nickel.

Obviously times change. The soda fountain was ripped out of the drug store the year I turned 10.

Silver coins disappeared from circulation over the next three years and a couple of years after that I lost all interest in baseball cards (who could know that a huge baseball card hobby would thrive in the 1980s and early 1990s?)

Life and change go hand in hand.

But Twinkies on the rocks?

Even if they no longer cost just 12 cents and have greatly risen in price like everything else, their very existence is reassuring. Or it was.

I certainly can’t be a kid again, but knowing that there is at least one treat that crosses the generations helps keep my memories alive.

I expect somebody will save the brand and buy it out of bankruptcy and it will go on. But even the hint of a possibility that Twinkies could disappear makes it just me and my coins.

Fortunately, numismatics is still there for me.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."

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