stopped craving sweets in my teens, and haven’t craved them since. I tell my eight year old daughter, who is incredulous to hear such a thing, that I must have reached a point of overdose. Here I was, youngest of four children in a family that owned a candy factory, no less. As I grew up, my friends all wanted to know: what was it like to own a whole candy factory?

 

The factory, founded by my grandfather, actually bore my name: the DeWitt P. Henry Company, Confectioners. My grandfather, himself named for the country doctor who had delivered him, insisted that a grandson carry on his name. My parents had put him off, naming my older brothers John (Jack) and Charles (Chuck), but given that I was the last chance, they conceded. Our father was the President, John Henry. Each day Dad, dressed in a tailored suit, with a felt hat, and with his briefcase, left for his commute from St. Davids to Germantown in the “company car” (a Plymouth station wagon with push-button fluid drive). But then on weekends, occasionally we would make a family expedition to the factory with him. I don’t remember my oldest brother Jack going. I do my next oldest, Chuck, who worked for Dad for a while in the bookkeeping department, which was a poorly-lit, dingy area up some rickety stairs, to an area over the refrigerated compartments. Chuck’s weakness was for peanuts and chocolate-covered cherries. My sister Judy, older than me, younger than Chuck, was my partner on these forays. My father would be seeing to some papers in the front office, where he had a big oak desk, a leather desk chair, and where a large, framed photograph of my grandfather hung behind him, smirking as if he had a chocolate in his cheek.

 

Judy would lead me to explore. We would enter the refrigerated packaging department through a heavy, vault-like door (a good twelve inches thick), turn on the lights, and all the conveyor belts full of various chocolates would be spread out as fair game. We would take paper bags from the sample room and start working the belts and bins. A bag filled with chocolates would last me for a week. Imagine the smells, chilled chocolate and ammonia. The temperature, winter or summer, was maybe 40 degrees. The lights were banks of fluorescents. Nothing moved. We prowled as freely as Goldilocks. We bit into round, oblong, and square chocolates to find out what they were: nut chews, creams, marshmallows, mints (green, pink, orange inside), coconut, nougat, caramel, and syrupy cherries. Judy favored mints. I loved some of the chocolate covered jellies and the chocolate marshmallows. The packaging room had boxes ready to fill, scales to weigh them, and the conveyer belts, motionless now, brought candy in from another department, where enrobers coated the different centers with melted chocolate and then passed them through a cooling tunnel. Depending on the season, there were specialized boxes for different varieties, such as the jellies, to be sold in supermarkets. Then there were gift assorteds, fancy boxes with waxed paper cups to be filled according to a fixed design. Though I must have visited during the actual work day with Mom when I was younger (I remember being introduced to some of the regulars and being treated like royalty, fussed over by a grinning woman dressed in a uniform like a nurse), it wasn’t until I was nineteen and I had my own turn working here in the summer as a helper pulling stacks of boards, and repairing them in the shop, that I really saw the factory alive at work, some one hundred and fifty employees.

 

All the workers in the packing department were women and girls, wearing blue and white uniforms and hairnets. Then there were the men in the chocolate department, cooking the chocolate and the centers in huge steaming kettles; and men in the enrober department. Part of my job as a general helper, was to pull stacks of interlocking trays with starch molds (stacked some six feet high on dollies with wheels) to the machines where various centers would be deposited in the moulds; and then to pull stacks of the centers to the enrobing machines. My brother Jack had worked with the mechanics, keeping these machines in good repair, and sometimes making modifications. But then he’d had an accident and lost the first joint of his left little finger to the sprockets of an enrober, and he quit on the factory soon after, and moved to Colorado for a second try at college.

 

Mom, Chuck, and Judy, all talented artists (Jack was a draftsman), helped Dad by designing cardboard boxes with cellophane windows for Easter items. They created the trademark logos, an oval outline of “Henry’s” in distinctive script, which served as our trademark on stationery as well, along with the motto, “Keep Candy Handy.” Dad even had Jack and Chuck take wrappers from “Henry’s Mint Patty” and scatter them in as litter around town, so people would think they were in demand. With great care, Mom constructed the boxes and drew cartoon rabbits, ducks, and chickens, designs that were later printed and put into production for Chicky Doodle (a yellow marshmallow chicken), Perky Rabbit (hollow inside), and for Henry’s Easter Egg (filled with coconut cream). The latter came in several sizes, but the one I recall was five pounds and the size of a meatloaf. You sliced it like a meatloaf as well, dark chocolate coating a quarter inch thick, with a flat bottom and decorative swirl on top, and inside, the coconut cream, with little shreds of coconut. Finishing off such an egg took weeks, with tin foil covering the open part, so it wouldn’t turn hard and stale. Chuck and Jack would finish theirs. I never did. Once it hardened, I would throw it out.

 

The first supermarket in our suburb was built just after World War II: the Acme. It competed with the local grocery store, Espenshades, where Mom used to shop, and still did for meat, and the Farmers’ Market, where she went for vegetables. We regarded the Acme with a degree of disdain for its impersonality and also for its architecture, just down from the florist’s on the Lancaster Pike: it had a tile tower that said Acme sticking up from a modern box and plate glass window design. As we wandered its bright aisles with our cart, I remember a display of Easter candy, and that Mom remarked that the Henry eggs and Chicky Doodle weren’t selling well. She bought one to show Dad.

 

I loved our national, more famous brand competitors, and Dad as President of the National Confectioner’s Association, knew many of the executives who made them: Clark Bars, with the peanut butter center; Milky Ways with nougat filling, though I didn’t like the gooey caramel. I liked nut chews, but not Almond Joys. I loved Hershey kisses. I loved dark chocolate buds. I binged on M&Ms. Special times, Mom would buy chocolate marshmallows, and other candies, of course: jelly beans, gumdrops, mints, mint patties. Occasionally, we had Whitman’s Samplers (I avoided nuts, went for jellies, mints, cherries), which Dad must have brought home for comparison and research.

 

We went with Dad to candy conventions in the Pocono mountains, Judy, Mom and Me, and stayed at a hotel. I remember the formal dining room, and a drawing, where I won a golf bag. The former quarterback of the Chicago Bears, Sid Luckman, was a friend of Dad’s. I had never heard of him, but when he visited our house (having retired from football and joined some major chocolate firm), he gave me his signed book—an autobiography--as well as an autographed football. As I played with the football, of course, the autograph faded, and when I kicked the ball high in our side yard, it came down and was skewered on an iron spike on our fence. Such visits by businessmen to our home were rare. But another was by a tall, imposing man from Chattanooga, Tennessee named Bill Brock. His company made mint puff balls, which sold in large quantities down South and Dad was working out an exchange for distribution and sales. The Henry Company would distribute Brock in the Northeast, and Brock would distribute Henry candies in the South. Brock had stepped on a piece of candy while visiting the factory and now had his foot up on the edge of our kitchen sink, cleaning his expensive shoe.

 

Dad had different distribution deals, all relatively small time. Uncle John, back from World War II, was his salesman. Also Jack Dreyfus (whose son later started the Dreyfus Fund) sold Henry products out of New York. Candy bars, patties, and cheap chocolates were sold through a Canteen Distributor, who placed them in vending machines. From grade school on, whenever kids heard that my family made chocolates, they always asked, “What, ‘O’Henry’ bars?” I never met anyone, ever, who had bought a Henry product. There were no ads or commercials. For all Dad’s efforts, we never attained brand recognition in our region, let alone the world.

 

For a while, age nine or ten, I was impressed by Dad’s role as a businessman, gave up my earlier fantasies of being a fireman or a G-man, and saw myself as one day running the factory. Without understanding a word, I looked through ornately bound volumes of something called the Encyclopedia of Business that we kept in our sun porch bookshelves, and which (I learned later) Mom had given Dad, when he had worked for the Walter Baker Company in Boston, and had aspired to a corporate career. I kept his cast-off, leather briefcases, both the attaché and accordion style, filled them with company stationery, and with trade journals that he had thrown away, which I pretended to peruse. During visits to the factory itself, I played with adding machines and typewriters in the outer office.

 

Perhaps I stopped eating sweets because of cavities; perhaps trying to control weight; perhaps because of adolescent acne (Clearasil years). Perhaps because of my increasing ambivalence towards Dad, and his remoteness, his weight problem and diabetes, and revelations first from Mom and then from him about his years of severe alcoholism, which began shortly after I was born in 1941 and climaxed after my grandfather’s death in 1948, when he submitted to treatment. And as for running the factory, as my brothers and sister had done before me, I soon chose other dreams.

 

The gift of a toy printing press when I was ten had led to my serious play in putting out a four-page newspaper, which I sold to classmates; and which, in turn, led to my writing articles and stories. In school I was praised for my writing. I loved books, beginning with YA science fiction, with paperback westerns that were Jack’s passion, and with mysteries with sexy covers that Dad brought home from business trips; then, with my mother’s and sister’s encouragement, I tried out book club classics in our home library, such as John Steinbeck’s novellas; and still later, at my sister’s urging, Dostoyevski, Kafka, and Poe. That one and only summer I worked in the factory (I still have the Withholding Tax Statement for $32.50), with my freshman year at Amherst under my belt, I’d started writing a novel. I spent my lunch breaks reading Faulkner on the shipping dock. Everybody working there knew me as the third and last Henry son. The head shipper, a florid, red-faced old-timer named Bill Cassidy, took me aside for an earnest, private talk. What did I want to be? What were my plans? He’d known Jack (who by then had started a construction business in Colorado), and Chuck (an intern at Bryn Mawr Hospital); worked with them both. Dad kept him up on our lives. Did I realize the opportunity that I had here? You don’t want to walk away from something like this, he said.