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Wrapped Up: The Great Fairfield Candy Mystery is Solved

'Mrs. Barske Was Quiet and Serious About Her Job Selling Candy'

I couldn't just leave it alone. When I wrote about "The Great Fairfield Candy Mystery" a few weeks ago, I thought I had learned all there was to know about the house on Valley Road with the candy store attached to it. And, to be honest, I wasn't sure that anyone would really care about the story.

Boy, was I wrong on both counts.

I'm happy to say that the "mystery" has been solved, or at least I have enough information now to close the case. I now know who Mrs. Barske was.

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One of the first questions posited was, "How do you spell the name of the old woman who owned the house/store?" When I talked with people who remembered buying candy there as kids, they seemed to think it was either Barsky or Barski. Turns out, her name was Fannie Barske, with an "e." Who would've guessed?

One person thought Mrs. Barske might've been a survivor of the Holocaust. Again, that was wrong. She lived in Russia but left many years prior to the Russian Revolution. I came to learn this information in a rather circuitous way.

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After the initial article ran, a woman named Teresa O'Reilly sent me an e-mail: "I live in the old candy store house!"

Cha-ching! I immediately contacted her and asked if it would be possible to come see the house. She was exceptionally accommodating.

The house is a lovely Federal-style structure, circa 1820. It's been changed over the years (originally it had a second-floor veranda and a wraparound porch), but the interior has been restored by the O'Reillys. "It had been on the market for one and-a-half years," said O'Reilly. "It was a two-family house at the time. It was divided up into all these little rooms, but it had good bones, and I thought, 'I could live and die here.' " That was in 1999.

The O'Reillys purchased it and bit-by-bit, worked on restoring it. "One day, my husband and I had too much coffee," O'Reilly said with a laugh. "We took a hammer and chisel to the wall." That's when they discovered the huge center fireplace with a beehive oven.

While O'Reilly could tell me plenty about the house, she didn't know much about Mrs. Barske. She did, however, know the Realtor who had worked with the Barskes when the house was sold, and so I was given another clue.

In the meantime, I got an e-mail from a fellow blogger, Samira Kawash, who writes CandyProfessor.com, a blog about the history of candy. She came across an article entitled "Mrs. Grant's store a favorite spot for children," published in the Wilson (N.C.) Daily Times. The story was so close to Mrs. Barske's that it was eerie. The author wrote, "Aside from the many outstanding kid-friendly products sold there, Mrs. Grant's had some other traits that made it unique and appealing. First of all, it had Mrs. Grant, a grand old lady who served as owner, shelf-stocker and clerk along with being a friend and grandmother figure to every little kid who ever plopped down a few cents on her counter. Also, the store was located right in the middle of Mrs. Grant's front yard at 1404 Downing St., and I can't imagine how cool it must have been to have a candy store in your own front yard."

Clearly the universe was telling me that I needed to do some further investigating into the Great Fairfield Candy Mystery.

A few phone calls later, and I was talking with Harriet Barske Sacher, the granddaughter of Mrs. Barske.

"My grandmother knew how to farm, cook, trade land," said Sacher. When she came from Russia, she went to New York where she met her husband, Morris. They bought the house in 1906 and he worked as a tailor in Bridgeport. Together they had six children. Unfortunately, Morris died when he was 42, leaving Fannie to raise the children by herself. After World War II, her brothers set her up with a little store.

At that time, in the 1940's, there weren't many houses around. In fact, Mrs. Barske owned the land from the house on Valley Road all the way to Park Avenue. It was farm land, situated on a dirt road. "Kids would come over after school," said Sacher. "Not many, three or four at a time. They'd come for the penny candies."

Sacher lived in the house with her parents and brother, Ray, until she was 21. Ray was next on my call list.

Ray Barske now lives in Bethel, Conn., but has fond memories of living in the Valley Road house and Mrs. Barske's shop. "It started out as a little store," said Ray. "She'd sell fresh eggs, milk and bread. Even in the waning days, people would still come to get a can of beans."

Her other inventory items included ice cream, soda and cigarettes. "She'd sell cigarettes to kids whose mothers would send them out for a pack," Barske said. "She had a box of Oxydol in the window for 30, 40 years. And she had one customer who bought cigars."

Both Sacher and Barske recalled the cowbell on the door that would alert Mrs. Barske to customers. "She'd be watching TV and someone would come in at 8 at night," said Barske. People in the area just knew about the little store.

"When she sold baseball cards, the kids didn't want the gum," said Barske. "They'd hand it back to her. She had a stack on the counter, about 30 slices high."

You'd think that living above a candy store would be great for a kid, but Barske said he got some ribbing from the other children, because they presumed he could get his candy for free. But that wasn't necessarily the case. "We'd bring our penny down to the store after dinner," said Barske. "You could go there with 20 cents and get 20 penny candies." He recalled that when a candy company raised their prices to 10 cents a bar, Mrs. Barske called to complain. "She was still operating in the old school," he said. "At the very end, penny candies were 2 cents. You could get a little bag of four jellybeans for 2 cents."

Mrs. Barske ran the store until six months before she died in 1972. "The first time she was ever in a hospital was when she had pneumonia, eight months before she died," said Ray. "All her kids were born at home."

Today, of course, the candy store is long gone. Ray and Harriet hated to part with the house, but, raising families of their own in other locales, they decided to sell it. When the O'Reillys bought the house, they converted the store into a kitchen, and a window is now where the door used to be. But Mrs. Barske's candy store lives on in many people's memories.

Amy Schine recalled, "I lived around the corner from the shop on Random Road, and Barske's was just always 'there' for as long as I can remember," she said. "My siblings and I, and the other neighborhood kids, would always go there for candy and just for something to do. I remember the glass counter, with all the candy under the glass so you could point to what you wanted. I remember getting licorice, wax tubes with different colors of sugar syrups, fireballs, jawbreakers, and other hard candies, always in a brown paper bag."

She continued: "On shelves behind the counter there was always a box of clothes detergent and also old packages of toilet paper. Mrs. Barske was quiet and serious about her job selling candy. She didn't show a whole lot of emotion, but occasionally she'd get annoyed or frustrated with bratty and indecisive kids."

From the penny candy to the old box of Oxydol, Mrs. Barske still lives on in many people's memories. "When they did her eulogy," said Barske, "they said she was one of the pioneers in the area. It's true. That store was her baby."

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