Today we celebrate a famous orange and yellow candies that most moms and bakers use for decorating their favorite Halloween food, the Candy Corn. This day is observed annually on October 30th.
Candy corn is most often found in the United States and Canada. They have shaped a liked triangle, orange and yellow with a white tip made of sugar, corn syrup, confectioner’s wax, and binders. Each piece is approximately three times the size of a real kernel from a ripe or dried ear of corn. They are usually made from a mixture of sugar, corn syrup, confectioner’s wax, artificial coloring, and binders.
The first candy corn was manufacture in the 1880s by the Wunderlee Candy Company and was called “Chicken Feed”. Wunderlee Candy Company was the first to produce the candy following the 19th century, the Goelitz Confectionary Company, now called Jelly Belly manufacture the product.
Candy corn is considered a staple of the Fall season and Halloween holiday in the United States. The taste of candy corn can be described as somewhat polarizing and has been a subject of wide debate. Candy corn is made by hand during the 1800s, now manufacturers invented the machine to make life easier and fast since the demand for Candy Corn has been popular.
Nowadays, you can find Candy Corn in a variety of colors depending on the holiday you associate it with like Halloween has orange and yellow, and during Thanksgiving, you can find orange and brown. They are also available during Christmas, and they are in red and green, and on Valentine’s, they are red and pink.
So, today, celebrate this day by buying bags of Candy Corn to give out for Halloween treats or use it for decorating your Halloween cookies. Share on social media some recipes and photos using #NationalCandyCornDay.
1938 Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio play is broadcast
“The War of the Worlds”—Orson Welles’s realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth—is broadcast on the radio on October 30, 1938.
Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells’ 19th-century science fiction novel The War of the Worlds for national radio. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of “The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name. “War of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of the havoc it would cause.
The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.”
Sunday evening in 1938 was prime time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.
(excerpted from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/welles-scares-nation)
