Where I Go: The Candy Wrapper Museum

Your Trash Is My Treasure—And a Sweet Reminder of the Past

In 2019, an unassuming package arrived at my front door.

Inside was a sooty 2-by-4-foot scrapbook filled with candy wrappers over 70 years old. On the surface, a piece of trash—one that in fact came from a dumpster, saved from oblivion during the move of Necco (the New England Confectionery Company) from its Cambridge, Massachusetts factory to nearby Revere in 2003. After the company went bankrupt 15 years later, it traveled 2,950 miles to La Verne, California, to the ranch house my husband Joe and I call home.

Why am I now …