True Confections (14 page)

S
AM ALWAYS USED
the same words, telling the story of Eli’s flight from New York. Straight to Grand Central Terminal, straight from Essex Street, Sam would say, and then, invariably,
he would pause to add, You know, kiddo, the right name for the train station is Terminal? You got that straight? Because Grand Central Station is a post office branch and all you could buy there for yourself is stamps, not a train ticket.

So Eli took himself from the Essex Market Courthouse straight to Grand Central Terminal, leaving his pushcart on the street, right there at the bottom of the courthouse steps, without even stopping at his rooming house to collect his few possessions, his habitual library book still in his jacket pocket, never to be returned. Straight from Essex and Delancey to Grand Central Terminal he went on a nickel train ride on the Brooklyn-Manhattan line, and there Eli bought a ticket for the last stop on the very next train to leave the station, and on the train he read and reread that little book he happened to have in his pocket, to pass the time, and to calm himself. It was a copy of Helen Bannerman’s
Little Black Sambo
, which is how he got to the end of the line, New Haven, with an idea.

I
AM PERFECTLY
aware that a lot of this information about Zip’s Candies and Ziplinsky family history and Eli Czaplinksy’s flight from New York is not in dispute, and therefore some of this history could appear to be irrelevant to the matters that
are
in dispute, but in order to provide all the facts, I prefer to give the most complete context possible. The Ziplinsky family has tried to control the story of their business and their family history over all these years, which has made it especially necessary to tell this counterstory, to note the elements in the Zip’s time lines and glossy official histories that have been shaded or obscured. Just as chocolate is tempered in order to achieve maximum gloss and snap, so has the Zip’s Candies history been tempered. I have begun as I mean to go on; it is extremely important to me that
these pages lay out with complete clarity every aspect of my knowledge and beliefs and experience with Zip’s Candies and the Ziplinsky family. So this is a warning to any party reading this affidavit. If you get impatient and start to skim, believing either that you already know everything and there is nothing new here, or that the details I hereby provide so meticulously have no significance, you just might miss what is most interesting and important.

W
HEN THE CURTAIN
rises on Eli’s next act, according to the official Zip’s Candies time line, it is springtime of 1924, and he has been working in New Haven for Armenian cousins who make chocolate-covered coconut bars overnight in their basement kitchen when the air is cool so they can sell them door-to-door each morning before the day warms up and the Choclettos and Coconettos melt. So here is Eli once again walking the streets, selling candy from a pushcart, working for whatever he can make in a day. Is he restless? Is he convinced that he can do better? Of course he is. He is a married man now, with a pregnant bride, the former Lillian Rosenfeld, a pretty girl in her photos (though she thickened and aged very rapidly after the death of her second son). Lillian is a highly skilled dipper whose departure from the coconut bar line was a blow to the Armenians. She will soon give birth to their firstborn child, their son Sam, a robust eight-pound baby who will be born “two months premature.”

Lillian had been their prize dipper, quick and precise, efficient and tidy. One day as Eli waited for his stock, she caught his eye. He was mesmerized by her quicksilver hands, enticed by her deft way with the lumps of shredded coconut, intoxicated by her speed and composure. He asked her to show him how she
dipped the Coconettos so quickly and neatly. She giggled and showed him. He tried to imitate her movements, but he dripped melted chocolate all over the dipping table and down his shirt. Soon they were keeping company.

When Peter Paul Halajian and his brother-in-law Calvin Kazanjian, with backing from Shamlian, Hagopian, Kazanjian, and Chouljian cousins, decide to expand their operations and open a factory in Naugatuck (where they name the company after Halajian, and place their faith in their Mounds coconut bars), Eli is invited to stay with the business and move with them, but he sees a bargain and buys the old equipment from the Armenians for a few dollars. And with enough money to buy a building, money that may have something to do with his hasty exile from New York (who can say if he managed to take one of those bundles of money from his pushcart with him when he ran away from the Essex Street Courthouse? It was a long time ago, does it really matter? This is how Sam would always tell the story), he waves his hand in the air so frantically that nobody wants to bid against him and so he places the winning bid for the River Street building and its contents in the bankruptcy auction of a small machine shop.

The building has most recently been home to Peet Engineering, a young business driven into the ground by its hapless proprietors in less than two years. The Peet brothers are hell-bent on producing their single-minded invention, the One-Lock Adjustable Reamer, but they give no thought whatsoever to marketing and distribution. Milo and Alvy Peet pour all their funds into pursuing this dream, the perfection of the One-Lock Adjustable Reamer, but nobody knows about it, and so of course nobody buys it, and the day comes when they have no money left in the bank, no way to pay their workers or their creditors, and the bank won’t give them any more credit, and that’s that.

Perhaps even with brilliant marketing there would never have been sufficient demand for this innovative product to keep a factory going, but who can say? They didn’t plan ahead, Sam would tell me his father would always say, with a rueful shake of the head. They had only one product, and they were undercapitalized, they didn’t have the cash to get off the ground and stay off the ground long enough to find out if it was a good thing people would want. Bad break for them, lucky break for the Ziplinskys. Eli gets the building cheap.

There is a candy factory to be assembled from the welter of mechanical creations left behind by this failed venture, a cautionary tale in itself. Motor-driven assembly lines snake through a series of workstations, tool benches, lathes, packing tables. Wrenches lie where they were laid down on workbenches holding half-finished machined objects, blueprints beside them, by workers at the end of their shift who did not know when the whistle blew that they would never hear it again, that the doors would be padlocked by the bank before morning.

The assembly lines are adaptable, and Eli is an adapter. He makes a candy factory. He is a man with a plan. The factory itself is not hexed. He will not rely on just one product. Zip’s Candies will diversify before it begins, and risk will be spread among Eli’s three
Little Black Sambo
–inspired candy products.

Workers are hired. Factory machinists with experience and nerve and nothing to lose are employed to repurpose and retrofit and solve the giant puzzle of how to make the three candies Eli has in mind out of these machines and the wagonload of candy-making equipment the Armenians left behind when they decamped to Naugatuck to build their own factory. While Eli makes do with their castoffs, Peter Paul would churn out Mounds and Almond Joys (and, less successfully, Dream, Main Show, Almond Clusters, and the especially lamented Caravelle; when
they acquired the York Cone Company, they made York Peppermint Patties, too) in their modern, streamlined factory, until the bleak November day in 2007 when the factory would go dark, the brand having been sold to Cadbury, which after a few years licensed it to Hershey’s, who decided despite earlier assurances to the contrary to consolidate manufacturing operations by moving the Mounds and Almond Joy production to Virginia, putting two hundred and twenty loyal workers out of their jobs.

As a completist, I note in passing that Naugatuck has also been abandoned by the United States Rubber Company (as it was known until 1961, when it became Uniroyal), maker of automobile tires and the nearly eponymous Naugahyde, and Keds. Poor postindustrial Naugatuck, once proud home to so many industries churning out all-American products, but now just another very quiet, old-fashioned town built on an obsolete foundation, with only a few desultory small-town businesses dotting Rubber Avenue.

I don’t know why, exactly, but Frieda used to characterize with her most withering disdain people or things that did not meet her standards as being “strictly from Naugatuck.” Possibly this had to do in some way with her barely concealed jealousy about the immense success of Peter Paul compared to Zip’s, which has always had a niche and held on to it, but certainly has never achieved a fraction of the market share of those ambitious Armenians and their coconut candies.

T
HE
T
IGERMELT IS
a straightforward bar, distinguished by the tiger stripes of dark chocolate over the milk-chocolate coating, which enrobes a classic nougat and caramel peanut bar. It is inspired by the tigers in
Little Black Sambo
, who take all of Little Black Sambo’s fine clothing, from his red coat to his blue
trousers and his beautiful little purple shoes “with Crimson Soles and Crimson Linings”—they even take his beautiful green umbrella—only to get into an angry dispute about which of them is the grandest in his fine clothing.

“And at last they all got so angry that they jumped up and took off all the fine clothes, and began to tear each other with their claws, and bite each other with their great big white teeth … And they came, rolling and tumbling right to the foot of the very tree where Little Black Sambo was hiding, but he jumped quickly in behind the umbrella. And the Tigers all caught hold of each other’s tails, as they wrangled and scrambled, and so they found themselves in a ring round the tree … And the Tigers were very, very angry, but still they would not let go of each other’s tails. And they were so angry, that they ran round the tree, trying to eat each other up, and they ran faster and faster, till they were whirling round so fast that you couldn’t see their legs at all. And they still ran faster and faster and faster, till they all just melted away, and there was nothing left but a great big pool of melted butter round the foot of the tree.”

Mumbo Jumbos are two ridged discs of licorice candy, one black, one red, which fit together with a satisfying, yin-yang click, like two stacked contrasting checkers. They are named for Little Black Sambo’s devoted parents, his mother, Black Mumbo, and his father, Black Jumbo. Mumbo Jumbos don’t melt very easily. Every chocolate candy company should have a nonchocolate, warm temperature–stable candy option, like a seafood restaurant’s having steak on the menu for that one person at the table who hates fish. It’s smart business.

L
ITTLE
S
AMMIES, IN
fact named for Little Black Sambo himself, are clearly the single confection to which Eli is most dedicated,
having been profoundly influenced by his first American sweet, a Tootsie Roll given him by a kind guard while he waited for his medical inspection the day he arrived at Ellis Island. By the time Eli passed his trachoma inspection (the man in front of him, who was also from the Pest side of Budapest and had boasted to Eli and Morris about his cousin in Brooklyn who delivered ice and had a job waiting for him and said maybe he would help the Czaplinsky boys find work, failed the trachoma test, and his coat was chalked on the back with a humiliating
X
before he was led away), he was savoring on his tongue the last lingering, sweet morsel of that inaugural Tootsie Roll.

Little Sammies are by far the most complex of Zip’s three products to fabricate. The inch-long chewy chocolate-toffee figures require precise molding, cooling, and coating. Hand-dipping is not entirely satisfactory for achieving the glossy chocolate coating shell Eli strives for, because in his mind’s eye Little Sammie should shine, though the earliest Little Sammies are out of necessity hand-dipped, and soon enough the giant rotating kettle that had been used to hold the annealing bath for machined cogs and screws is converted into the Little Sammies panning drum and then, say, don’t those Little Sammies shine as they tumble off the line!

O
N
N
OVEMBER
12, 1924, a score of workers is poised. The power-supply lever is pulled, the first machines are switched on, and then the next machines are activated, all down the lines, and like new rides at a carnival, the mechanical contraptions that will make the three confections for which Zip’s Candies will be known for decades to come, into the next century, all clank and whirr and hum to life. There is a photograph of this moment. We see a white-coated Eli, with a full head of dark hair, standing
proudly with his hand on the lever like the captain at the helm of his ship, with his grinning paper-hatted crew at their places all along the lines. An unsmiling Lillian, in a flowered dress intended to conceal her postpregnancy bulk, can be seen off to the side, holding a swaddled bundle that is her infant son Sammy.

Moments after the photograph is taken, smoke pours out of the motor driving the head pulley on the Mumbo Jumbos belt, and it has to be shut down immediately. A month goes by before that line is running smoothly and true production of stock can commence, but the photograph reveals no herald of that temporary setback, and shows only the ignition of the Zip’s Candies engine that would drive Eli just as Eli drove it, working perpetually to keep his dream of his beautiful sweet candies and the success and prosperity those candies bring moving forward, always moving forward. He kept the lines moving until the day he died at a regrettably young age of a massive heart attack only twenty-two years later, sitting alone in his office on a Friday night, reconciling order sheets to close out the week.

H
ERSHEY’S
C
HOCOLATE HAD
contracts to supply the U.S. military with Ration D Bars and Tropical Bars, both created with an innovative formulation that kept them from melting, which made them stable in the North African desert, even if they did have the texture of chewy linoleum. In the course of the war, Hershey’s produced more than three billion of these bars for consumption by American troops around the world. Eli admired the way Milton Hershey parlayed those contracts, because not only was this an extraordinary volume of business, but it also allowed Hershey’s to expand production capabilities on the government’s nickel. In 1939, Hershey’s could produce a
hundred thousand ration bars a day. By the time the war ended, Hershey’s was cranking out twenty-four million ration bars a week. But Eli took more than a little satisfaction in the knowledge that even Milton Hershey was not immune to the stresses of war, which forced him to suspend production of Hershey’s Kisses in 1942 because of a shortage of the foil used to wrap them (production would not resume until 1949).