True Confections (15 page)

Eli recognized a good marketing strategy when he saw one, and figuring that he had the advantage of offering his first line product, not some inferior-tasting, gritty, shelf-stable nutrition bar made to government specifications, he went after government contracts for Zip’s, but his efforts failed. Instead, Eli went all out with significant Little Sammies donations to the Red Cross for food parcels in the final twelve months of the war and the first six months of occupation. It was a hardship, because commodities were expensive and unpredictably available. Lillian made numerous objections to giving their product away at a time like this. Perhaps he had gone too far. But Eli insisted, even though he was bitter about Milton Hershey’s cleverness in finagling those contracts that eluded him. He recognized the genius that lay behind Hershey’s investment in giving American soldiers a taste of home that would create a permanent atavistic association with America and the taste of Hershey’s slightly sour milk chocolate.

By the end of 1946, the postwar sugar shortage had not quite ended, but the insatiable demand for Little Sammies by returning GIs was the payoff for all the Zip’s Candies donations to the Red Cross. Sugar was very hard to come by from week to week. Milton Hershey had that angle covered as well, with his own Cuban sugar plantations, even his own railroad to carry the sugar across Cuba from his refineries to the port of Havana. Processed cacao supplies were irregular. Eli had taken to staying
late at work in order to make call after call to chocolate processors and brokers who might have some new sources for him. There were rumors of small quantities of decent cacao beans coming out of Congo, Trinidad, Ghana. But now he had found the solution, a surprising source in Madagascar that would both ensure Zip’s Candies a guaranteed supply of good cacao and also change the course of Ziplinsky family history. His body lay on the floor behind the desk, samples from the day’s Mumbo Jumbos scattered around him, when young Sam, married just a few months to Frieda (who was by then pregnant with the first of their three children, the doomed Lewis), eager to claim his weekend off and irked by the disruption of his plan to take his pregnant bride to the movies (she adored Dana Andrews, and they were planning to see
The Best Years of Our Lives)
, having been sent back to the factory by his mother that Friday evening when she became concerned that Eli hadn’t come home for his dinner, found him.

T
HE TRADITIONAL
M
UMBO
Jumbos pack has a very good reputation among licorice aficionados. The package is a graphic delight, one that has hardly changed from the original to the present moment. It features the Zip’s green umbrella against a festival of contrasting stripes, which make reference to the colorful outfits worn by Little Black Sambo’s mother and father.

The market for licorice has always been small but steady. Devotees are appreciative of a good, chewy, flavorful licorice disc, especially one modeled on the wheat-based Finnish licorice nibs Eli knew from his New York street peddling days, and not on the more elastic, corn-based products like those that had already been around for decades by then—Red Vines, made by the American Licorice Company in Chicago since 1914,
and, even older, the various licorice candies made by Young & Smylie since 1845 (Young & Smylie became part of the National Licorice Company in 1902, which in turn renamed itself Y&S Candies in 1968), those red and black twisted vines that over the years mutated into the nearly plastic Twizzlers, which dominates the licorice market share today and which since 1977 has been owned by Hershey’s (that insatiable devourer of small candy brands, from Good & Plenty to Heath Bars to Jolly Ranchers to Reese’s to Dagoba to Scharffen Berger). I am partial to Red Vines, which are best eaten when slightly stale. They can be toughened up in a few hours by deliberate exposure to air.

T
IGERMELTS DO WELL
from the beginning, with plentiful orders—it’s a familiar combination bar, the dark-chocolate tiger stripes are a pleasant gimmick, the wrapper features a row of tigers chasing one another in a circle, and there is a charming slogan on the original wrapper, too: “Plain Hungry? Or Tigermelt Hungry?” (We had to drop that slogan when we redesigned the wrapper to accommodate nutritional information, once that became a legal requirement.)

But it’s the Little Sammies that are a tremendous success, once they are finally perfected by the middle of 1925 and are tumbling off the line with the glossy finish exactly right, exactly the way Eli dreamed up his Little Sammies, his true confections. The public loves them from the start. Originally, they are packaged in twos, in that waxy yellow wrapper with the Zip’s signature green umbrella emblazoned with the words “Say, Dat’s Tasty!” The innovation of adding the third Little Sammie comes in 1932 as a way to offer the penny-pinched consumer more value for the same nickel, and Little Sammies have stayed
three to a pack ever since. (Because this is a bit crowded, Little Sammies may get stuck together in the package; we recommend that you open the package and expose them to the air before you eat them.)

Little Sammies have always been fresh, I would like to point out, unless you let them grow stale after purchase. We make them, we ship them, they sell. I can only laugh at the genius who dreamed up the Hershey’s marketing campaign for “Fresh From the Factory” opportunities, one select line at a time, on their website. All of our candy is always fresh from the factory! It’s true that any limited availability can create an artificial surge in demand for product, the same way a limited-edition brand extension does, whether it is a variation that swaps dark chocolate for milk, or uses almonds instead of peanuts, or adds a mint or a caramel option, to name the four most obvious limited-edition variations.

Last year Jacob and I sent away for some “Fresh From the Factory” Twizzlers in order to see firsthand what Hershey’s was actually selling. The product was impressively fresh, to be sure. One of those F From the F Twizzlers will droop if held balanced on your index finger. In contrast, an off-the-rack Twizzler from the Stop & Shop is darker and so much stiffer that holding it in the same way is like balancing a pencil. The not-so-fresh Twizzler was also noticeably tougher, bite for bite. Jacob admitted that he preferred it to the droopy Twizzler, which was like an edible lanyard. Jacob can be perverse that way. If “Fresh From the Factory” is billed by Hershey’s as the optimal, premium taste and texture experience, isn’t that a rather risky strategy, cultivating in consumers an awareness of the staleness and inferiority of all the rest of your retail stock?

T
HE FIRST
L
ITTLE
Sammies sell out in New Haven and then they sell out again; production is increased, and they sell out all over New York. Soon national retailers are clamoring to place orders, and then the New Haven Railroad wants to sell them on all the passenger trains that run through New Haven, and then the Boston & Maine Railroad wants Little Sammies as well, and three chains of movie theaters start stocking Little Sammies. Within months Little Sammies have slots in grocery stores and gas stations across America. And canny Eli requires that for every case of Little Sammies ordered, a certain number of boxes of Tigermelts and Mumbo Jumbos must be ordered as well, thereby ensuring growth and steady business for the other two Zip’s lines.

And so former Little Augie errand boy with a pushcart Eli Czaplinsky becomes Eli Ziplinsky, the beloved, innovative, industrious, hardworking, visionary founder and proprietor of Zip’s Candies, maker of one of America’s most beloved childhood treats, Little Sammies. The lines are in perpetual motion forever after, these crazy aggregations of thriftily appropriated machinery mixing and blending and forming and extruding a never-ending flow of Tigermelts, Mumbo Jumbos, and Little Sammies.

S
AM, OBVIOUSLY, FELT THAT
I was family. He chose to reward my loyalty and devotion to the family and the business. That is the only explanation for his decision to leave me, as he did, 25 percent ownership of the Ziplinsky Family Limited Partnership, which is to say, Zip’s Candies. Whether or not all family members agree with his choices, whether or not all family members respect his choices, surely the time has come to accept them. For God’s sake, it’s been eleven years now. The last will and testament of Samuel Ziplinsky has been honored by every court. The estate is settled. The distributions have been made. The identities of the Ziplinsky Family Trust beneficiaries are in dispute, but there is really nothing left to haggle over in Sam’s estate. As the only living child of Eli and Lillian Ziplinsky, Sam had total ownership of Zip’s Candies, having inherited the business from his mother, Lillian (to whom ownership had passed when Eli died without a will in 1946), when she died in 1975, just a few weeks after I walked in the door at Zip’s. I am glad I met Lillian that one time, as it connects me to every generation of the family business.

I should add here, in the interest of delineating every branch of this bonsai of a family tree, that Sam’s younger brother, Milton, died just months before the end of World War II, in his first week of basic training, at age nineteen, when he was accidentally shot in the face on the rifle range at Camp Jackson. Fortunately, he had no children—none that have been identified, anyway. I
should know better than to assume anything about the reproductive habits of the Ziplinskys, but if Milton’s children exist, they have badly missed the boat on stepping forward with their hands out, and given how useful their existence could have been to swing the majority vote in order to force a sale of the business, and how nightmarish that revelation would have been for me, I am pretty sure any issue of the late Milton Ziplinsky would have been truffled out by now.

So Milton doesn’t play any part in this history or the present set of conflicts, though as the unofficial family historian/ counterhistorian, I note with interest that he does take his hallowed place among the missing in this peculiar family, Milton being his generation’s golden boy who dies a tragic early death and leaves the family out of balance, with a cascade of shifting roles.

Howard and Irene’s older brother, Lewis, is another piece of the strange pattern. Frieda’s golden boy, Lewis—her firstborn, the clear heir apparent to the business even as a child, by all accounts a wonderful, charming, smart, handsome boy—died at age fourteen when he was struck by lightning in Madagascar. I know how outlandish that sounds, like a perverse joke. He and Howard were there together that summer. Howard was twelve. They had been working among the vanilla orchids, doing a lot of tedious hand pollinating, and then the two of them had skived off with Andry, a local boy apparently their age who was nominally in charge of them, for a swim in the river. (They had been warned to keep a watch for crocodiles, believe it or not. How could anyone have thought this was a safe place for these tender boys to spend their summers? Especially cautious Jews?)

Black thunderheads rolled in, the wind shifted, and fat drops of heavy rain were suddenly pelting down on them. Tropical rainstorms can be sudden, and they can end just as suddenly. As
the boys horsed around in the water, the rain seemed to let up, but then it intensified all over again and there was a rumble of thunder. Andry and Lewis very responsibly swam to the water’s edge and started to hoist themselves out onto the sandy river-bank. Howard was still bobbing around in the middle of the river, his head tilted back with his mouth wide open to catch the raindrops, when lightning struck the wet boys as they clambered out. Andry, who was touching Lewis’s arm when the lightning strike occurred, was severely burned, but he lived, though today he walks with a limp and is thought to be a bit simple. (He is still employed by the Czaplinsky family, as a gardener with few genuine responsibilities.)

Lewis had been struck directly, and he died instantly. Howard told me this story when we went out to dinner that first time. He narrated in a careful and remote way, with little emotion beyond a small sad smile that wasn’t really a smile, pulling his mouth down at one corner, and I really thought at first that he was making it up. He described these events to me the way he might have been telling me about a disturbing movie he had seen a long time ago. When I look back now on the way I fell into that inexplicably intense relationship with Howard, I believe Lewis is in the story. His tragic death, the way each Ziplinsky carried that sorrow—it attracted me. I know it did. I was moved by the unbearable sadness that surrounded the story of the short life of the older brother, which added meaning and context to Howard’s glibness and clowning, but at the same time, Lewis’s absence made me feel that there could be a place for me in this family.

M
ORRIS
, M
ILTON
, L
EWIS:
all those missing sons. Irene would tell you it is Kennedyesque, the way those first sons were
struck down. This pattern has obviously been broken in the next generation, though I say that with just a little bit of a sense of whistling in the dark. My two kids are healthy, as is their cousin Ethan. But who can guarantee anything? (And of course there are the cousins in Madagascar. I know I brought them up, but Newton and Edison Czaplinsky don’t come into the story quite yet, though of course they will have been there all along.)