Kids today don't know what they're missing when it comes to that corner candy store.

I did most of my business at Ed's. It was just down the street; a good place to buy paper kites, balsa airplanes and those cap rockets. Remember? You put a cap in the rocket's nose and spiked it on the sidewalk. Or against a wall or a rock.

Ed also carried the traditional staples - bread, milk, cereal, a few canned goods, beer and soda. But he was best known for his penny candy. Ed had the best assortment of penny candy around.

Ed Michalski ran the place on Clinton Street in New York Mills with his wife, a happy, impish little lady named Josephine. We all called her Mrs. Ed. Peeking through Ed's big glass-covered counter into that sea of sugar was fun enough. And with a nickel or dime, you could usually buy enough to get you through an afternoon. A quarter was more than enough to spoil your dinner, and did wonders for your popularity.

The best thing about penny candy, of course, was the price.

I don't know what I liked best, but I do know that in the bubble gum department, Chum Gum was tops. Originally, it came three sticks to a pack for a penny. Later, they knocked that down to two, but they were fatter sticks.

Double Bubble and Bazooka only gave you one piece for a penny, but they were molded so that you could tear them in half and share it with a friend. And you got comics with them. But they didn't have that special taste Chum Gum had.

Bubble gum also came in other forms, like big grape, sour orange and sour cherry gumballs. Bubble gum cigars - pink, green and yellow - and bubble gum cigarettes let kids pretend they were smoking, which in retrospect seems an awful thing to teach a kid.

You also used to get a pink slab of bubble gum with baseball cards, and I can still remember buying a few packs and sticking the gum in my pocket for later. And we wonder why mothers turn gray.

Cornhill also had a number of small, family-operated stores. They had much in common: the store being in the front, living quarters in the back or upstairs and family members who all pitched in to help out.

Many catered to specific nationalities as did most Mom and Pop operations Welsh, Irish, German, Italian, Polish, Syrian, Lebanese, etc.

One store owner I recall was Joe Viggiano, also known as "Joe Bananas."

He was located on the corner of Third Avenue and Elizabeth Street and ran a popular store.

Two other popular family-run stores on the east side were Ziemba Brothers, at 1222 Bleecker, and Frank Tupaj, at 401 Nichols Street.

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Red Hot Dollars were probably the stickiest of the penny candy. They weren't really hot, and Ed sold them two for a penny.

Molasses Mary Janes, Bonomo's Turkish Tally (vanilla, chocolate and strawberry) and Kits - penny five-packs of tiny taffy candies - were a good buy for a kid with little money and lots of time.

Here's a sampling of some other things you could find at Ed's for a penny:

FIREBALLS - "Atomic" fireballs. Atomic was something relatively new in the 1950s and I suppose a good adjective for the makers of those cinnamon spiked jawbreakers to capitalize on.

SHOESTRINGS - They were strawberry flavored and about two feet long.

WAX STUFF - Bright red lips. Black mustaches. Multi-colored fingernails. Pink tongues. And big white buckteeth. These wax disguises were laced with sugar, and you could chew them after you got done making a fool of yourself.

ICE-CREAM CONES - Not real ice-cream cones. Rather, the "ice cream" was a swirl of some hard marshmallow-like stuff plopped atop what looked like a crispy cone. The cone usually wasn't that crispy and the marshmallow was pretty hard. Not one of your better buys.

BEAD CANDY - These were hard little drips of something stuck on a sheet of paper. They usually came in a variety of colors, but all tasted the same. Eating methods varied, but the most accepted technique was to just bite them off the paper one by one. You usually ate more paper than candy.

OTHER HARD CANDIES - Root beer barrels had staying power. Red peach stones were a real deal: three for a penny.

JUICE-FILLED WAX - Those long cylinders were filled with colored sugar water and were great for attracting ants. We used to bite off the end, suck out the juice and then bite off the other end and blow little pieces of wax at each other.

Mr. And Mrs. Ed were kind enough to stay in business until I outgrew the sugar habit and upon retirement, they remodeled their front room candy store, added a porch, took down the big "Hershey's" sign out front and aluminum-sided the whole place.

Ed died several years later and his wife moved away. She, too, has since passed on, I am told. Today, the little building that kept the kids smiling looks like any other little village home.

But they can't fool me. I still smile when I pass by.