travel: April 2009 Archives

I didn't expect to be struck the other day by a profound sense of the way the smallest thing can send the path of our life shooting off in a new and hardly imagined direction—not in a museum about a guy who made candy, at any rate. But that's what happened. A travel writer (among other things) friend suggested we meet up and see this new musem: The Hershey Story: The Museum on Chocolate Avenue. (There really is a Chocolate Avenue in the Pennsylvania town of Hershey, home of Hershey chocolate. It's the main drag.)

First we had lunch in the café. Updated food, paninis and such, and they didn't all have chocolate in them. But they did have a tasting bar where they served up a variety ofchocolate from different parts of the world mixed up in a syrupy liquid. It was like a flight of wines, and served with the utmost seriousness, and it really was interesting from a tasting standpoint. And I found it a bit intoxicating, but not in the kittenish food-writer sense: I've always heard that chocolate has psychoactive alkaloids, and as it happens I went staggering away with some kind of buzz going.

Then you go through the museum itself. They've obviously relegated the word "museum" to the subtitle, because although museum-going seems to be holding its own these days, there's a great deal of effort made to convey an experience, to tell a story. Nobody wants to go look at old stuff. But they do like stories, and this museum really does succeed in that. It's not about chocolate, it's about a guy named Milton Hershey. There's a huge emphasis in the beginning on his unpromising early life. He was apprenticed to a printer, didn't much enjoy it, and one day dropped his hat in the machinery in what was not necessarily an accident. This had a bad effect on the machinery and his tenure with the printing company.

Then he went into business himself and went bankrupt twice—they have a letter in a case in which he's asking for money from a relative. But he liked being in the candy business, was successful eventually with a caramel company, and then became fascinated with milk chocolate, a luxury item produced by the Swiss.

Hershey bought machinery to make chocolate, and bought a large parcel of land amid the dairy farms of Lancaster County. Through trial and error, experimenting with processes used on both the milk and the beans, he found a way to produce milk chocolate cheaply enough that it was affordable for a mass market. This did his fortunes no harm, and he became fabulously wealthy, creating an entire town to support his new venture.

He married, and the couple couldn't have children, so Hershey devoted himself to the welfare of his workers and the wider world. (The museum, with laudable forthrightness, describes the 1937 strike by Hershey workers, which Hershey found personally painful.) He made sure his employees had quality homes, transportation, schools, and recreation facilities at a good price. He established schools, a hospital, and the Milton Hershey school for needy children. As you leave the museum, you see video of teachers and children from the school today, and there's a palpable sense of the influence the man's generosity of spirit still has. It's quite something, really—he was born in 1857, and can still help people today.

But the thing that struck me most was at a point about halfway through. OK, you think, he made milk chocolate affordable. But what if he hadn't? What if he'd given up and gone to work for his cousin behind a counter of a hardware story in Terre Haute? (I'm making up the cousin, although I've heard Terre Haute is a real place.) Hershey bars would not be the utterly ubiquitous thing every living American has known since earliest childhood and finds as familiar as his or her own hand. I got this strange what-if-my-parents-had-never-met feeling about how life and fate go.

But Milton Hershey hung in there. And after he was successful he used his money well. Up until now, I always thought about calories when I saw a stack of Hershey bars at a newsstand counter. But from now on, I'll think a little bit about Milton and the roller-coaster of fate on which we ride—cats and kings, cops and candymakers, and most of all you and I. Interesting museum, I must say.