by Steve Almond
Over the years, Marty had received a lot of offers from people who wanted to buy the business, or a portion of it. It was their assumption that Palmer, as a small, independent candy company, was on its last legs. Marty’s standard response was to agree to sell the business if the potential buyer agreed to pay him what he knew the business was going to be worth in ten years. He would then provide an estimate—rather a large estimate—and the buyer would, often in a state of pique, demur. Marty enjoyed these exchanges a great deal. They were one of the dividends of his hard work.
Another was the chance to produce—or, at least, to fantasize about producing—new products. He realized that kids these days were more interested in handfuls of things and sours. But Marty himself favored “the old soldiers,” vanished candy bars of yesteryear. His most cherished dream was to reintroduce a bar called the Walnut Crush, which had been made by the Fenn Brothers, up in Sioux Falls, 100 miles north. “That was a delicious bar,” Marty said, a little dreamily. “It was kind of like a 3 Musketeers, but the filling was bright white and it had a walnut flavor and a different texture, what we call ‘short,’ which is a baking term, meaning that it bites off cleanly, it doesn’t pull. It was covered in dark chocolate. A very unusual piece.”
The Fenn Brothers went out of business in the early seventies. When Marty took over, he tracked down the old formula and found a few former employees, who described how they made the Walnut Crush: laying the centers on cookie sheets and drying them for three days. That process had given the Crush its distinct snap, but it also made the bar impossible to mass produce, at least profitably. Marty’s heart seemed to sink a little at the memory.
He was, after all, being asked (or asking himself) to play two conflicting roles simultaneously: Guardian of the Past and Forward-Thinking Business Owner. This duality was apparent everywhere, in his business decisions, in the factory’s mishmash of new and old equipment, even in the decor of his office, which included a sleek computer as well as a framed piece that I’d been eyeing curiously. It appeared to be an aged strip of cloth stitched with the Palmer name, along with the legend DELICIOUS CHOCOLATES SOLD HERE. “Actually, that’s a branded calfskin,” Marty said. This was a nod to Sioux City’s legacy as a leader in the meat industry. Back at the turn of the century, Palmer delivered its candies as far as a horse-drawn wagon could travel in a day. These wagon jobbers would often nail a calfskin sign to a post out front of the dry goods stores they visited. “These guys were the Bud signs of their day.” He had framed his.
He had a lot of other relics, too, stuff he couldn’t quite bring himself to throw out, though he knew he probably should. “It is nice to have a little history around,” he said, almost apologetically. “It helps you remember where you came from. My grandfather used to come in all the time to chew the fat. He told me about this promotion they used to run for a boxed chocolate product called Lucky Day, or Golden Strike, something having to do with luck. What he would do is cook up a batch of 300 pounds of soft nougat and throw a handful of gold coins into the batch and then of course they’d be made into candy. As a consumer, you knew you might get a piece of gold. You’d get arrested today for doing things that used to be good marketing.” Marty shook his head.
While we’d been talking, a secretary had appeared and placed a box of chocolate pretzels and clusters on his desk. These were my parting gifts. We climbed into his SUV, which was about the size of my apartment, and cruised toward town.
Sioux City is best known, historically, as the starting point of Lewis and Clark’s westward expedition. There is a large, phallic monument not far from the Morrell plant commemorating the explorers, as well as a business park environment named after them. In fact, Sioux City had been the biggest town between Chicago and Denver at the dawn of the twentieth century. But then someone had paid off someone else and the railroad had gotten routed through Omaha and Sioux City had gone into a steady decline.
The city was enjoying a renaissance, though, in part due to Gateway, which had come to town and brought 7,000 jobs. Marty cited the restoration of the Orpheum Theater, where he had gone the previous evening to see Riverdance. The city was also hard at work on a 10,000-square-foot events center. Marty was especially pleased by this project, because it was being built right next to the old Palmer factory, the first floor of which was still being used as a candy shop. We paid the shop a brief visit so Marty could show me the cracks in the tiled floor, the result of two errant boxcars which, back in 1931, bounded across the street and crashed into the front of the building.
Just before he dropped me off at the Greyhound bus station, I asked Marty if he ever questioned the decision he’d made to return to Sioux City. He said no, not really, that he realized the place wasn’t Paris, but this is where his factory was and he felt a responsibility toward the 100 workers he employed. He had no delusions about the future. “It would be neat to have a sixth generation,” he said, gazing at the fleet of gantry cranes that loomed over his downtown. “But you never know what kids will want to do.” It seemed to me, in that moment, that Marty Palmer was straddling the two worlds that compose our lives, the past and the present, with tremendous grace.
SOUTHBOUND WITH THE HAMMERS DOWN
So I left Marty riding a high of borrowed optimism. Great things seemed possible. What I needed was a positive attitude, an appreciation of my own history, a sense of possibility. This lasted 23 minutes.
I was four hours early for my bus, so I wandered down Sixth Street, past the hospitals, toward the wide and muddy Missouri River. Sioux City reminded me of El Paso, weirdly, because of the various down-in-the-mouth Mexican restaurants, but also because of the low-slung dustiness of the place, the proximity of a strong-smelling industry (in El Paso it was lard), and the general sense of lassitude. It even looked like El Paso on a map: the convergence of three states around a river. North Sioux City was actually in South Dakota. South Sioux City was in Nebraska. Neither of these states, thankfully, had felt it necessary to post guards at their border. Last of all, there was the bus station itself, which I initially mistook for an abandoned dwelling. It was a fantastically grim little spot at the top of a ragged bluff, full of tired, yellow air.
I thought about the rental car I might have been driving, had I not lost my driver’s license, had I not hated myself quite so much, had I grown up in a different family, one with a finer appreciation for the simplicities of love. By now, just after four, I’d be on the outskirts of Kansas City already, checking into a hotel room, settling into a bath, with one of the Rocky pictures blaring on cable.
But I was, instead, in a gravel lot, shivering alongside a group of passengers with duffel bags and battered plastic sacks. If you ever want to know what America really looks like—and I direct this chiefly toward the residents of the coastal cities who tend to write about America most frequently—I would suggest you abandon the airports. The only people in airports are rich people. Take a bus from Sioux City to Kansas City, via Omaha and Maryville. Here is where America lives, more often than not overweight, beset by children, fast-food fed, television-dulled, strongly perfumed, running low on options and telling their stories to whomever will listen, hatching schemes, self-dramatizing, preaching doomed sermons, dreaming of being other people in other lives.
The woman next to me, thickly shadowed about the eyes, munching on a fried fish sandwich, told me she’d been in Sioux City for the weekend, up from Council Bluffs to visit her boyfriend, who hadn’t seemed to love her so well when they were living in the same town, had even mistreated her, but was now pledging undying love, had asked her to move in actually, and even proposed marriage, though without a ring.
“I’m waiting for the ring,” she said.
“That sounds like a good idea,” I said.
I thought about my own romantic history, such as it was. I’d been no better than this fellow in most cases—a little slicker, maybe, a little cagier. My last serious girlfriend had been the woman from Sioux City. She was the one who had
turned me on to the Twin Bing, a few months before I politely bailed on her. Recently, she’d sent me an e-mail to let me know she was getting married, and this note, more than I liked to admit, had contributed to my blue mood. It occurred to me that I was envious of my neighbor. She was, at least, engaged in that most human of struggles, toward love, while I was playing it safe in solitude, keeping my hands busy, my heart on ice.
The bus hurtled on toward Omaha, where we took an hour break. The station there was bigger, full of ancient video games and vending machines, a bacterial snack bar, and crowded with people in an amped state of transit. The kids were running wild as a response to all the anxiety and their parents were overdoing the discipline—tears, recrimination, the whitehot building blocks of future arrests. On the grainy TV overhead, an anchorwoman was waxing eloquent about the next day’s elections. Her demeanor suggested the basic message: Isn’t democracy neat? Democracy is neat. The notion that the poor man’s vote counts as much as the rich, that the poor might band together in order to choose benevolent leaders; this is as neat as civilization gets. But you would have never known that the election had anything to do with the people gathered in that station.
Outside, in the cold clear night, an old man, drunk to the point of disorientation, kept trying to board the bus. When the driver approached him, he would back away, hands up, and mutter into his sleeve. There was a family of six, no dad in sight, who seemed to be moving their entire estate south, suitcase after battered suitcase, even the little ones with their load to bear, midwestern refugees.
The driver for the second leg of our trip was a jovial fellow who looked like Ichabod Crane and sounded like Louis Armstrong, a combination I found disorienting. “Howdy back there,” he growled into his intercom. “We’re headed southbound with the hammers down. So just re-lax and leave the driving to yours truly.”
All around us, darkness was coming to the plains. The children were settling down to sleep and a few adults were murmuring in their little cones of light. I tried for sleep, but the night had called my anxiety out of hiding. I could feel it rippling my stomach, whispering its ancient incantations. You are unworthy of love. Candy will not save you. We barreled south into Missouri and detoured at Maryville, through a freak hailstorm that clattered off the roof of the bus and frightened the children from their dreams.
9
THE CANDY BAR ON YOUR CHIN
At nine the next morning a white van emblazoned with the orange-and-brown Sifers Valomilk logo pulled up to my hotel. Russ Sifers hopped out. He was wearing a white sweatshirt, also decorated with the Valomilk logo, and matching brown corduroy pants. “This is what I wear to work every day,” he announced. “You look in my closet, it’s pretty boring. Five pairs of cords, five sweatshirts. I’m at a point in my life where I can be very laid-back. I’m not out to set the world on fire.”
This was not entirely true. Despite running what was, by any standard, a tiny operation, Russ Sifers had generated a massive amount of press, in part because he had a good story to tell and in part (as I would discover over the next few hours) because he so relished telling it.
Russ had the sort of face that makes for an excellent mall Santa, ruddy and full-cheeked. He even wore the requisite gold-rimmed spectacles. He moved deliberately and spoke in a Missouri twang so slow as to suggest a kind of theatrical folksiness. When he related a story, which was often, he acted out his own role in an exaggerated version of this sodbuster accent. “Got an e-mail this morning from a lady who can’t find Valomilks in Des Moines,” he told me, as we sped north toward his factory. “So I’m gonna have to check that out when I get home. No computers in the office, course. I tell folks we’re computer-free. No PDAs, no beepers, no cell phones, though we do have an electric typewriter with correction ribbon.”
Russ pulled up in front of a small building with a flagstone façade. It did not look like a factory. In fact, the building had housed a day-old bakery before Russ rented it out fifteen years ago. He checked the production schedule taped to the wall outside his office. It listed each day, followed by the word cook or a blank space. The inventory as of that day was one box. When Russ told people that Valomilks were made to order, he meant it.
His office had the feel of a museum. A copper kettle stood in one corner, along with antique bottles of vanilla, candy molds, yellowed ads, photos, mixing spoons, and punchboards. Sifers was one of the first candy companies to produce punchboards, and one of the last. Russ’s grandfather, Harry, had nearly gotten himself arrested for selling them, because they were considered gambling.
A framed photo above the kettle showed the company’s headquarters, circa World War II, a stately building rising from the heart of downtown Kansas City. When people asked Russ how long he’d been in the candy business, he always told the same story, how on Easter morning 1948, his mother brought him down to the factory. Russ was in a basket and his proud grandfather toted him around, boasting to all his employees, “This is the heir apparent to the company.” For a long time, Russ figured this was just his mom, telling a quaint little Moses-and-the-bulrushes-type story. Then, one day, he received a letter from a former employee. “Dear Russ,” it began, “I’ll never forget the day your grandfather brought you around the factory in that Easter basket.” To Russ, this story had acquired the semimystical power of a creation myth: he was born to make candy.
The Sifers family began producing confections in 1903 in Iola, Kansas, before moving the business north to Kansas City. Russ’s great-grandfather Samuel Mitchel Sifers was one of the most prolific figures of the candy bar boom, creator of such delicacies as the Old King Tut, Subway Sadie, Ozark Ridge, Rough Neck, Jersey Cow, Snow Cup, and the KC Bar.
The Valomilk didn’t come along until 1931. Like many of the most famous candy bars, it was the result of a snafu. Back in those days, vanilla had a high alcohol content and, as the legend goes, Sifers employed a candy maker named Tommy who’d been hitting the vanilla pretty hard. He was supposed to make a batch of marshmallow, but it came out all runny. Harry was always looking for new ideas for candy, so he put scoops of the runny marshmallow in milk chocolate cups. The Valomilk (the name is a rough amalgam of the ingredients) was an instant hit. Russ’s father later introduced a chocolate version, and a crunchy Valomilk, with toasted coconut, followed soon after. “My dad was liable to experiment,” Russ explained. “People write me sometimes and say, ‘Why don’t you make the Crunchy anymore?’ My dad loved coconut. He’s dead and gone. I hate coconut.”
I told him I understood completely.
Russ graduated from Kansas University with a degree in business administration and went on to get certified as a candy technologist. There was never much doubt as to whether he’d join the family business. When his father retired in 1974, he took over at the ripe old age of 26. During the fifties, Sifers had been one of the most prominent candy concerns in the Midwest. But by the time Russ came along, the business had been bought out by Hoffman, a Los Angeles–based company that produced a similar marshmallow cup called the Cup-O-Gold. They had grand plans, to consolidate and go national. In effect, though, Hoffman was an absentee owner. The arrangement “didn’t work worth a hoot,” Russ recalled. In ten years, the owners visited Kansas City a grand total of three times. In 1981, they opted to shut the Sifers factory down and the Valomilk disappeared from the candy landscape. Six years later, Russ decided to resurrect the company on his own, using equipment salvaged from the old plant.
Russ settled himself behind a vast mahogany desk. It, too, had been handed down from his grandfather. A Depressionera canvas banner hung on the wall behind him, advertising Valomilks at five cents a piece. Nearby was a map of the United States beset by colored push pins. These were intended to chart various aspects of Valomilk’s distribution, though the system had been somewhat compromised by Russ’s tendency to use dark blue pins, for instance, when he ran out of light blue ones.
Russ cocked his head. “You hear that?”
I didn’t hear anyth
ing, just the dull roar of traffic. Then it came to me—a faint syncopated rhythm: ba-bum-ba-bum.
Russ smiled. “There’s a real music to the line when it’s up and running. Let’s go see what they’re doing.”
Before we could do that, a young man in a blue uniform appeared and introduced himself as a fire inspector. “I was hoping to look around the premises.”
“Sure!” Russ said. “Of course! You ever seen a candy factory? You’ll love it.”
He led us down a short hallway, which was (like much of the available office wall space) decorated with press articles about Valomilk, then outside, and then back inside through a second door. The ba-bum noise was now louder and more distinct: a sharp hydraulic hiss followed by a metallic ping.
To call the operation a factory is technically correct, but somewhat overstates the scale of things. It looked more like an industrial kitchen. Russ gestured toward a squat cylindrical machine, the chocolate melter. A worker opened the spigot and filled a small pail with chocolate, which he set about vigorously stirring. He allowed the chocolate to cool a bit, checked the temperature with a thermometer (which I very much wanted to lick), and began stirring again. It took me a moment to realize that he was actually tempering the chocolate by hand. This is almost unthinkably impractical—the rough equivalent of GM casting their bolts by hand. But it was typical of Russ’s approach to candy making, which was attractively fanatical.
He was equally picky about ingredients, insisting on pure cane sugar, for instance, rather than beet sugar, and bourbon vanilla, which is grown exclusively on the island of Madagascar (formerly the Isle of Bourbon), the source of the world’s finest vanilla beans. The vanilla cost Russ $200 per gallon. Years ago, Russ told me, he used spray-dried egg whites for his marshmallow. Then he heard a rumor about a slightly higher-quality product, pan-dried egg whites, and knew, at once, he had to have them. He started making calls and eventually found a gentleman at the American Institute of Baking, who told him there was only one company in the country that made pan-dried egg whites. Russ was so thrilled when he finally tracked them down that he rushed home to tell his wife. Guess what, honey? he said. I just increased the price of our egg whites by 53 percent!
