Made In America - Bill Bryson [128]
In 1900 he sold his caramel business for $1 million – this at a time when $ 10 was a good weekly wage – and turned his attentions to the still fairly novel process of making milk chocolate. This new venture was such a huge and instantaneous success that within three years he was able to embark on building his own model community, complete with streets named Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue, near his birthplace of Derry Church in central Pennsylvania. Among the names Hershey considered for the new town were Ulikit, Chococoa City, and Qualitytells, but eventually he decided on Hersheykoko. For reasons lost to history, the postal authorities refused to countenance the name and he was forced to settle on the more mundane, but unquestionably apt, name of Hershey. As well as the world’s largest chocolate factory, the town of Hershey boasted several parks, a boating lake, a museum, a zoo, a professional ice hockey team and the usual complement of banks, stores and offices, all owned by Mr Hershey. Hershey ran the town as a private fiefdom. He prowled the streets looking for malingering municipal workers, whom he would instantly dismiss, and personally supervised (with a certain presumed keenness) the censoring of movies at the local bijou. But he also engaged in many charitable works, most notably the building of one of the world’s largest orphanages for boys (and boys alone; orphan girls would have to look elsewhere) and endowing it with most of his fortune, some $66 million (today worth $1.7 billion).
The first true candy bar – that is, one containing ingredients additional to chocolate – was the Squirrel Brand peanut bar introduced in 1905. But the golden age of candy bars was the 1920s. Several classics made their début in that busy decade – the Oh Henry! and Baby Ruth bars in 1920, the Milky Way and Butterfingers in 1923, Mr Goodbar in 1925, Snickers in 1930. The Baby Ruth, originally called the Kandy Kake, was not, as is often supposed, named for the baseball player – in 1920 Babe Ruth had only just joined the New York Yankees and the bulk of his celebrity lay before him – but for the daughter of President Grover Cleveland. This bonny infant had indeed captured America’s heart and gained the affectionate sobriquet Baby Ruth, but that had been more than twenty years earlier, so the choice of her nickname for a candy bar in 1920 was a trifle odd. Still, it was perhaps no odder than Oh Henry!, named for a fresh-faced youth whose droll quips to the girls at the George Williamson candy factory in Chicago provoked the constant cry, ‘Oh, Henry!’
Among the many hundreds of other candy bars loosed on a willing nation during the decade were Big Dearos, Fat Emmas, the Milk Nut Loaf and the intriguing Vegetable Sandwich. Made of chocolate-covered vegetables it was sold with the solemn assurance that ‘it will not constipate’. As might have been predicted, constipation was not a compelling consideration among America’s children and the Vegetable Sandwich soon disappeared from the scene. Equally improbable, I would have thought, was the Chicken Dinner candy bar, so called because it was supposed to engender the feeling of well-being provided by a steaming roast chicken dinner. Though few people were able to make the leap of imagination necessary to equate a five-cent chocolate peanut roll with a well-balanced meal, the Chicken Dinner sold well and survived into the 1960s. Curiously, none of these products was known as a candy bar. The term is not recorded in print until 1943.
The 1920s saw the birth of many other well-loved snack foods, including such perennial mainstays of the American diet as the Good Humor bar in 1920, the Eskimo Pie a year later, Popsicles in 1924, Milk Duds in 1926, and Dubble Bubble Gum in 1928. This last was invented by Frank H. Fleer, whose earlier bubble gum, Blibber-Blubber, was something of a failure – it tended to dissolve in the mouth but to stick