A girlfriend once sent me a greeting card with the message, "I love you almost as much as chocolate itself." After some pondering - and a handful of chocolate chips - I resolved to take it positively.
Chocolate, after all, is life's deepest, most addictive, gooiest pleasure: chocolate bunnies on Easter morning, miniature bars in a Halloween bag, a chocolate malt on a sizzling summer day, hot cocoa after skiing. Whenever, wherever that sinfully fattening brown nectar oozes over one's taste buds, life is good. Complete. Yes, rich.
So imagine my consternation several months ago when I read a news account about the world's impending chocolate shortage. In equatorial zones across the globe, it seems that fungal and viral diseases and icky little insects are attacking cacao trees, whose beans are the raw material from which chocolate is made. The crunch may hit as soon as five years from now.
Uncharacteristically, I was moved by more than self-pity. I have two sons, Roy, 10, and Guy, 8, whose happiest moments are marked by chocolate syrup smeared on their faces. So it was with a heavy heart that I convened a family conference around our kitchen table to tell them they faced an empty life. Just at the point I was venturing the suggestion that cigarettes might eventually fill the void, my wife, Suzanne, jumped into the discussion.
She said the world would never let chocolate disappear. Moreover, she said, chocolate is a state of mind, like Christmas. She knew this, she said, because in her peripatetic Army-brat youth, she had once lived near the capital of chocolate, Hershey, Pa. She said the street lights there are Hershey Kisses, the main intersection is at Chocolate and Cocoa avenues, and the air itself smells of chocolate.
Yes! We sent for tourist literature, and almost before a certain substance might melt in your mouth, we struck out. We were headed for a destination the literature called "the sweetest place on Earth."
Our very first impression of the place was profoundly disappointing: The air did not smell of chocolate.
But things picked up. When we registered, Hershey Lodge gave each of us a candy bar - the classic milk chocolate slab - with our room key. The parking-lot stop signs had Hershey Kisses on them, as did each door. There was cocoa-butter soap in the bathroom. On the television was a channel
devoted to the subject of our quest. The first program was a history of chocolate, the next told about the amusement park and its six roller coasters, while the third conveyed the amazing tale of the Chocolate King, Milton Snavely Hershey. In these magical environs, the founder's spirit rules, as does his story.
Starting with caramel
Hershey, as he is still called hereabout a half century after his death, landed a job in an ice-cream parlor in nearby Lancaster when he was 15 and found a home in the candy kitchen. Four years later, he headed for Philadelphia to start a candy shop and failed. He failed again in New York. This ability to bounce back was an object lesson that I tried to point out to the boys.
His creativity was another lesson, though cunning might be the better word. Hershey returned to Pennsylvania and began to make caramels. He did very, very well. In 1900, he sold his Lancaster Caramel Co. for $1 million but shrewdly reserved the right to continue to sell chocolate. He had made the important observation that children licked the chocolate off chocolate-covered caramels and threw away the rest.
"I'll stake everything on chocolate," he pronounced. "Caramels are a fad. The chocolate market will be a permanent one."
And he matter-of-factly proceeded to learn how to make milk chocolate, then a luxury good produced in Switzerland. In no time at all, he had built a factory, named the factory town Hershey, and built a trolley system to bring milk and workers to the factory. A byproduct was a mass-transit system that stretched for miles.
The factory churned out tons of chocolate at prices the average Joe could afford. Success piled upon success. Kisses began to be made in 1907, and Hershey's soon became the world's largest buyer of almonds, for its Almond Joy bar.
Meanwhile, Hershey was bound and determined to make the town itself a model of benevolence for company towns. Houses were not made in cookie-cutter molds and were priced so workers could afford them. Hershey Park (it didn't become Hersheypark until 1971) was established in 1907 as a picnic ground for workers. There were free band concerts, vaudeville and, before long, a carousel. Other rides were added almost every year.
But almost from the beginning, the park was a tourist destination. Hershey persuaded the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad to build a spur to bring excursions there. And in the sort of mix of business and recreation that has become the touchstone of today's society, the cute little town with the Hershey smokestacks became an advertising tool.
For years, each candy bar contained postcards of Hershey. (Candy bars were bigger once.) Moreover, the company offered window displays of its namesake town to store owners all over the country as a promotional device.
At the same time, the big man busily created his own legends. When he walked through Hershey Park, he would pick up even the tiniest piece of litter - unless, of course, it was a Hershey candy bar wrapper. Those, he would turn over so the label could be read.
When he built an elegant Mediterranean-inspired hotel, he made the dining room circular, so nobody would have a corner table. He had noticed that people who tipped modestly ended up in such gastronomic ghettos.
Hershey's mansion was not remote; it was across the street from the chocolate factory. At the suggestion of his wife, Kitty, the childless couple devoted almost all their personal fortune to caring for orphans on farms surrounding Hershey, an initiative that the family's foundation continues, although today's beneficiaries are not necessarily parentless.
Breakfast treats
The infomercials ended. It was bedtime, particularly as the only feasible alternative was clearly the Cartoon Network. It was then we experienced our second disappointment: no York Peppermint Patty on the pillow. I had sort of expected it.
Upon waking up, we were thus especially eager to get to breakfast in the lodge's Lebbie Lebkicher's Eatery and Pub, named for a man who lent Hershey some money after one of his failures. It is decorated with old posters for nickel-and-dime candy bars. The waitress asked the boys whether they wanted chocolate milk or hot chocolate. She gave them crayons in a tin candy container.
"You're going to eat more chocolate than you've ever eaten in your life," she said.
I had coffee and four succulent chocolate muffins, but the children ate healthfully. To be sure, the waitress had point-blank refused Guy's request to give them plates of whipped cream. A Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, with a human inside, came by. Guy said, "It's fun shaking your favorite candy's hand, right, Dad?"
Youthful memories
Most compellingly, we marveled at the chocolate factory, with the giant Hershey Cocoa logo spelled out in shrubbery, as well as the towering silos full of cocoa beans. We saw Hershey Hotel, with the magnificent fountains and stone lions in the lobby and the stunning gardens outside. Reverently, we paused at the intersection of Chocolate and Cocoa and whiffed the air wafting over from the factory. Yes, Virginia, it smelled divinely of chocolate.
What was once the centerpiece of a Hershey visit, a factory tour, has not been offered for years. Suzanne remembered seeing huge vats of bubbling chocolate and savoring a chocolate milk on factory tours of her youth. By the early 1970s, the tour was drawing a million people a year, ultimately making it too crowded for the workers.
The solution was Hershey's Chocolate World, a Disney-like tour of chocolate, with visitors riding automated cars. The attraction has just been spruced up in honor of its 25th anniversary.
On the brief ride, about 10 or 12 minutes, one sees the world from the perspective of a cocoa bean. From being cut with a machete in an unidentified rain forest, you are shipped in containers to the Pennsylvania promised land for roasting, milling, refining and any number of other things. A Donald Duck-sounding voice provides commentary. The cars never stop.
"So cool, man," Roy intoned as we went through the roaster oven where the enveloping odor was you-know-what. The Hershey's Kiss machine would have been anticlimactic, had it not been so fascinating.
The final message, from an eminently sincere recorded voice, was: "No matter where you go, no matter how far, you're always near a Hershey's Bar."
When you go
Lodging:
* Hershey Lodge, West Chocolate Avenue and UniversityDrive, 800-533-3131. Open year- round. Room rates vary significantly according to season and specific package. Call for details and reservations.
* Hotel Hershey, Hotel Road, 800-533-3131. Open year-round. Room rates vary significantly according to season and specific package. Call for details and reservations.
Where to eat: Lebbie Lebkicher's Eatery and Pub, at Hershey Lodge, 717-533-3311. Open daily: 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. for breakfast, 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. for lunch and dinner. All major credit cards accepted.
Attractions:
* Hersheypark, 800-437-7439. Closed for the winter; reopens in the spring. Admission: $29.95, ages 9 to 54; $16.95, ages 3 to 8 or 55 and older; $18.95 for consecutive day (keep previous day's ticket stub); $15.95 late-day admission (call for specific hours); free for children 2 or younger.
* Hershey's Chocolate World, Park Boulevard, 717-534-4900. Winter hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. usually, but hours can vary and visitors should call. Free.
* Hershey Museum, 170 W. Hersheypark Drive, 717-534-3439. Winter hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $5; $4.50 for the elderly; $2.50 for ages 3 to 15.
* Hershey Gardens, Hotel Road (across from Hotel Hershey), 717-534-3492. Hours: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Admission: $5; $4.25 for those 62 and over; $2.50 for ages 3 to 15; members and children under 3, free.
Pub Date: 10/25/98