The Hershey Trivia Grab Bag

Just when you'd thought I had already written all the super interesting Hershey facts there are, I pull several more out of the trivia bucket. Plus, this is a great way for me to throw a few more pictures out there, like this one of Zoe sitting on a Twizzler fence. Ends up that the Hershey Company owns all sorts of wonderful other companies that make all sorts of wonderful other treats. I think I should bail out of the actuarial business and become a chocolate maker...or at least a professional chocolate eater, there's gotta be such a thing. There was a time in my life where I was all snooty about American chocolate not being as good as some of those European varieties, but I no longer feel that way. I'm proud to be an American.

• Using milk for chocolate was first done by Swiss confectioner Henri Nestle clear back in the early 1800s. It was Milton Hershey that found a way to stop the milk from fermenting after being added to the chocolate so that it could stay good long enough to be shipped around the world.
• Milton and his wife had tickets to sail across the Atlantic on the first and final voyage of The Titanic, but Mrs. Hershey fell ill a few days before the ship set sail so they canceled their reservations.
• Milton and his wife established an industrial school not too far from the factory. In 1918 Hershey donated his entire fortune to the school. The school still has ownership over most of the company.
• During World War II the Hershey Company produced up to 24 million chocolate bars each week, all of which went to the soldiers. They were known as Ration D bars.
• Milton's wife died in 1915 and was buried a few towns down the road. Milton had her dug up and reburied in Hershey. He did the same with the body of his dad. Weird. Why didn't Sara and I go to see his grave? We always think of these things after we get home.

Milton's Cows

I've been to a lot of state and county fairs, all of which have been attended by a huge number of cows. They really are ugly and smelly creatures, yet they provide for me the most wonderful of food groups. I'm thinking right now of all my favorite foods and if it weren't for cows I wouldn't have any of them. What's better than a Sunday night of steak, sour creamed potatoes and a huge ol' bowl of chocolate ice cream? I would definitely get my own cow and worship it if I had the extra square footage. I'm not sure who it was that first thought it would be a good idea to extract milk from a cow and drink it, but I'd like to shad his hand...after it had been throughly washed, of course.

I don't think it was Milton Hershey's love of cows that caused him to become the world's best chocolatier, rather, I think it was his intense hatred of the printing apprenticeship he had been consigned to as a lad. He disliked that job so much that he once threw his hat into the press in hopes it would break down (the press). He later joined up with a candy company there in Lancaster, a job that he fell in love with. His mom financed Milton's first candy company in Philadelphia, which failed. She then forked out the dough for another candy company in Chicago. It failed. Then she financed another one in New York City, which also failed. Milton and his mom's fourth venture, the Lancaster Caramel Company, finally succeeded and was eventually sold to the American Caramel Company in 1900 for one million dollars. With that sort of crazy 1900 cash, Milton experimented with fresh milk, which was in large abundance thanks to all the local Mennonite bovine, and found a perfect recipe which made the Hershey Chocolate Company the greatest company in the whole wide world! The town of Hershey itself, complete with amusement park rides, factory tours and all was the vision of Milton Hershey, it was Hershey's can-do attitude that has inspired Sara and I to name our next child Milton.

Sniff that Pennsylvania Air

We'd heard stories that the city of Hershey, Pennsylvania smells like chocolate, so we had to go investigate. Since neither of us had a golden ticket, we could only sniff the streets around town, rather than enter this fabled confectionery dreamland. No, I didn't pick up the smell of chocolate, but this must have been because we were there on a Saturday when the factory wasn't in operation. An old friend of Sara and I's who used to live in the area has told us that the legend is true but we'll have to go back on a weekday to verify it. I guess I should also clear up the fact that Hershey isn't a city after all, rather it is classified as a "census-designated place" in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. Not that it really matters, so long as they continue to provide the world with 80,000,000 chocolate kisses per day. Man I love those things. Have you tried the creme de menthe kind? I would probably sell a kidney for one of those...or I could just take a quick trip to the freezer. Okay, I'm back from the freezer. Wow, that's good. It is true, however, that the lamp posts in Hershey are shaped like my beloved lumps of chocolate. I think its cool that some of the kisses are wrapped and some are naked. Naked kisses? Ooo la la! I think Milwaukee ought to shape each of its street lights as beer cans. This would truly capture Brew City's deep rooted values. Also, this would provide the people driving home from late night drinking some familiar sentinels to follow as they wind their way through the streets. Perhaps the new street lights would compensate for the massive holes in Wisconsin's DUI laws. But that's a dark topic in what's meant to me more of a milk-chocolate sort of blog posting.

Scranton Welcomes You

Yes, we drove all the way to Scranton, Pennsylvania just to get a picture of the "Scranton Welcomes You" sign, as seen on the opening sequence of one of our favorite television shows, "The Office". The city of Scranton decided to move the sign from the highway to the food court at the Steamtown Mall to avoid all the traffic issues as The Office tourists stopped to snap some Scranton sign shots. This was fine though because it gave us an excuse to see the Victoria's Secret where Michael Scott took his female co-workers to shop. Sara wouldn't let me take any pictures of that. Zoe isn't a huge fan of The Office, as evidenced by her trying to squirm her way out of the pictures.

Scranton was the eastern extremity of our Mid-West voyage. After winding our way through the construction-laden streets of Electric City we began our westward trek back home, with many stops along the way. Driving through Pennsylvania we discovered that the mile marker signs are posted every one tenth of a mile. Does any other state do that? Whenever I'm driving and there's no conversating going on, my brain goes into calculating mode to keep myself awake. One of my favorite games is to use my speedometer and the second hand of my watch to predict when the next mile sign will show up. Thanks to the overzealous Pennsylvanian road workers, my game was rendered boring, and if it hadn't been for all the Led Zeppelin music flowing through the stereo I'd have fallen asleep and crashed into a mile marker. Thanks for all the embracing, Scranton.

Bedford, I mean, Seneca Falls

Film director Frank Capra visited the small town of Seneca Falls, New York in 1945. One year later he directed the greatest Christmas movie of all times, It's A Wonderful Life. Now check out this bridge right there in the middle of Seneca Falls...does that look familiar to any of you festive film fans? I'm pretty sure that George Bailey's hometown of Bedford Falls was based on Seneca Falls. I'm not alone in thinking that either, the town of Seneca Falls has an It's a Wonderful Life festival every December, and has actually named the roads in the area next to this bridge Bedford Falls Boulevard, Clarence Street, George Bailey Lane, and Angel Street. This is just the sort of thing that Sara and I would drive a few extra miles to see. I'm glad we did though because the Finger Lakes area is absolutely gorgeous and had we not taken this detour I don't think we'd have had the chance to explore the area. I would have jumped off the bridge, but my life insurance policy doesn't cover movie reenactments.

This one's just for you mom!

Ever since I was a young lad I remember my mom telling us that one of her dreams in life was to own a pink backhoe. When we happened to pass one on a little highway in the middle of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York we slammed the brakes on and drove back just to take a few pictures. We would have bought it for you as a Christmas present, mom, but I didn't want to drive it all the way back to Utah; all those miles may have scratched the paint!

Low Bridge, Everybody Down!

I'm a huge fan of modern engineering marvels such as tall buildings, nutty bridges and the like. Some of the coolest feats of mankind's building prowess are the giant canals that link many of the major waterways of the world. Don't we all want to navigate our way through the Panama Canal, just to say that we have? Heck, I've watched more than one documentary about the building of the Panama Canal and I find them super interesting, plus I've seen Arsenic and Old Lace twice. Someday I'm gonna drag Sara out to the Red Sea and float the Suez to the Mediterranean, kinda like tubing the canal in Logan.

Naturally, when I noticed on our map that we'd be driving near the Erie Canal, I immediately began searching for some convenient spot that we could stop and snap a few canal pictures. The search was short since one of the cities passed through by said canal is Palmyra! I don't remember where I heard it for the first time, but there's always been a small fraction of my brain dedicated to singing the Erie Canal song. Only when singing a song about a donkey named Sal can you actually get in touch with the angst felt by the canaleers of yesteryear. If you have never heard this song before, here's your chance, go to the following link to listen to it as sung by America's sweetheart, Bruce Springsteen. You'll be glad you did. http://www.last.fm/music/Bruce+Springsteen/_/Erie+Canal

As Bruce said, the waters of the 363 mile Erie canal flow from Albany to Buffalo, thus connecting the Hudson river to Lake Erie. Construction of the canal was begun in 1817 and completed in 1825, so this means that while Joseph Smith was living in Palmyra the canal was being built right through town. Interesting. The canal is 40 feet across and only 4 feet deep, and the dirt removed was piled in short hills along the banks. Donkeys, often named Sal, would walk along the hills, hitched up to the small barges full of cargo, hauling goods from New York to the Great Lakes. My what a job that would be. I wonder how long it takes to float the entire height of Utah at donkey speed.

Grandin's Book Bindery

In downtown Palmyra, just a block or two from the Holy Intersection, is the building where E.B. Grandin published the first edition of the Book of Mormon. I spent a few years working as a Book of Mormon publisher in the church's book bindery in Salt Lake and at BYU. I got to set up the machines and run all the signatures through for the BOM editions in weird funky languages that no one's ever heard of. It was like the coolest job ever. I just had to stop into the Grandin building and check out their operation, you know, perhaps give Grandin a few pointers. All the machines looked really heavy and dirty, I certainly hope that E.B. wore his steel-toed boots. The place was packed to the gills with tour guides and missionaries so I had to jog through while Sara and Zoe waited in the car, but it was worth it. Did you know that in 2007 one of the original first edition Books of Mormon was auctioned off for 180,000 dollars?

This time, 200 years ago

I don't think I could build my own house, even if I had all the funky logs, rocks, and mud that I could possibly need. Sara and I just got done watching the entire series of Little House on the Prairie, and boy could those guys build a house. They'd work out in the field all day, cut several trees into planks at Hansen's mill, drive many barrels to Sleepy Eye in the wagon, search for some frost bitten child and then come home just in time to build a kitchen. I, on the other hand, usually get home from ten hours of sitting on my rump looking at a glowing rectangle, and then whine because I have to lean over to pick up my shoes before I go to bed. Joseph Smith, on the other hand was a rustique farmer guy who was born in a log house that he built with his own hands, a replica of which is pictured with Sara above. The other picture is of Zoe perched upon her dad next to the little fenced-off square that is the actual locale of young Joseph's original log cabin. Why didn't they build the replica on the original square? Weird. So you know all those movies of Joseph Smith taking like a 20 minute walk to the Sacred Grove? That's just not true because the grove is right next to his house (or I should say his fenced-off square). I imagine Lucy Mack had to spend a lot of time trying to get all the sacred mice out of the kitchen.

So Joseph Smith was born in 1805 and lived until 1844. That was a super long time ago. He was 23 years dead before Laura Ingalls was even born. To put it into further perspective, the year Joseph was born, Napolean was still running around europe stealing stuff, Beethoven wasn't completely deaf yet, and Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States. Living in a tiny log cabin would pretty much be camping out your entire life, and I just couldn't live like that. Perhaps if I were typing this blog back in the 1810s I would feel differently since I wouldn't know the luxury of the oncoming century, but still I'm sure I'd be hoping that my kids would be able to graduate from wagon to station wagon and from pumping to plumbing.