True Confections Read Free

earlier candy-buying years, when I would ride my bike to the newsstand on Whitney Avenue on Saturday afternoons. With my fifty cents I could buy three comic books, a pack of gum, and a candy bar. Frankly, I tended to favor Baby Ruths. I suppose I had a vague awareness that Zip’s Candies was located somewhere in Connecticut, but I had no deep affection for boring and familiar New Haven, and my family was never one of those Chamber of Commerce,hometown pride kind of families. It certainly never occurred to me that I was destined to spend my life here.
    There was a reason for the anonymity of the building, I would learn. Zip’s had deliberately kept a low profile for a while at that point, although years earlier, especially in the 1950s, there had been a great deal of effort put into maintaining a very visible hometown identity, with local radio and television spots, sponsored parade floats, and lots of giveaways (rare Zip’s memorabilia is avidly sought by collectors, especially the Zip’s green umbrellas from the early fifties, a prize awarded to those willing to amass immense qualifying quantities of Zip’s wrappers and mail them in, with a dollar for postage and handling; these occasionally show up on eBay for ridiculous sums).
    Factory visits had never been permitted by Zip’s, for reasons having to do partly with hygiene but mostly with keeping secret the specific manufacturing techniques for each line because of a not-unreasonable family paranoia about the potential loss of trade secrets. Plus, Frieda just never wanted to deal with groups of children. That woman didn’t like people in general, and she really didn’t like children, preferring to keep her distance unless she had a specific reason (like, if they were her own grandchildren) to tolerate them.
    So, in my school years, I had experienced no class trips to the Zip’s factory to see Little Sammies and Tigermelts and Mumbo Jumbos whizzing along the lines on their journey from raw ingredients to finished candies to wrapped products tightly packed into boxes for shipping. This is in distinct contrast to the way I had been marched through Lender’s Bagels on three occasions by the time I was in sixth grade. In 1975, Zip’s Candies was so low profile that there wasn’t even an air of mystery about Zip’s, unlike the fog of rumor and innuendo that has surrounded the legendary fortress that is the PEZ factory inOrange, which no civilians have been permitted to penetrate since PEZ began American operations there in 1973. I fail to comprehend the allure of PEZ, I have to say. Even as a child, I was PEZ-resistant, more interested in the PEZ logo and the word itself,
PEZ
being a sort of Austrian shorthand for the word
Pfefferminze
, than I was in the cheesy dispensers or the actual candy (where’s the charm in a stack of compressed, tooth-pastey chalk bricks?). How many PEZ bricks in the PEZ logo? Forty-four.
    The Zip’s building had no sign. The original sign was in storage, I would discover later that summer when I was taking a smoke break out back by the loading area and spotted it beside a bin of old wooden shipping pallets. Not that the official company history would tell you this, but the truth, according to Pete Zagorski, the old-timer on the loading dock, was that it had been removed in 1969, in haste (by Pete Zagorski himself, who had been rousted out of a deep sleep before the sun was up by a call from Sam, asking him to hustle down to James Street and take down the sign, which is why he was so authoritative on the subject), on the first of May, because of a tip-off by a friendly detective with the New Haven Police Department. He’d heard a rumor that the charged-up mob on the Green protesting the Black Panther trial in the Elm Street courthouse was planning a march across town to the Zip’s Candies factory, to protest a certain candy inspired by Little Black Sambo, even if the company had for a while tried to revise history with statements about