{"id":2692,"date":"2021-07-12T13:00:43","date_gmt":"2021-07-12T17:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/?p=2692"},"modified":"2021-07-12T14:22:25","modified_gmt":"2021-07-12T18:22:25","slug":"a-taste-of-chocolate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/?p=2692","title":{"rendered":"A Taste of Chocolate"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Taste of Chocolate<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My mother worked at Fanny Farmer\u2019s chocolate factory when I was young. The factory itself was within walking distance of our house. My favorite activity when I was old enough (around 9 or 10) was to walk down to the factory and wait outside the exit door when her factory shift ended so that I could walk home with her. At least that is what I told her.<\/span><\/p>\n

In reality, my real reason was to utilize all the cute little boy looks I\u2019d been practicing. All of the female factory workers on my mother\u2019s shift left at the same time as she did. The cuter I looked, the more likely I was to get an offering of chocolate from one of those workers as they left. My only hope was, \u201cPlease don\u2019t let my mother be one of the first ones to leave,\u201d for there would certainly be no chocolate coming from her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not quite sure how all those workers managed to leave the factory with pilfered chocolate. My thought is that they were allowed to leave with pieces of chocolate that had imperfections that the owners did not want to put out to the public. Then again, they could have just taken some. Who\u2019s going to miss a few chocolates from the assembly line.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0I know when I was working at J. C. Penneys, as a stock boy, I couldn\u2019t believe how much good merchandise was thrown out down the garbage chute just because they had slight imperfections in manufacturing. The Penneys\u2019 management did this so that workers wouldn\u2019t purposely mar items in the hopes that they could get to walk out of the store with a discounted item. If any of Penneys merchandise had a problem, it was destroyed. I guess as long as you\u2019re not massively imperfecting chocolate, letting a worker walk away with a few pieces is within the range of acceptability.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The trick to getting chocolate was not to pick up my mother every day. You had to spread out the cuteness, otherwise, you would become just a piece of ignored furniture to the regulars and free chocolate would never again be offered no matter how cute you looked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My mother only worked for Fanny Farmers for a few years, so my so-called free source of chocolate was now gone (as much as a \u201cfree\u201d source of chocolate would be for an 9-year-old since I never actually paid for chocolate before or after she worked at Fanny Farmers).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, my love for chocolate never waned. Of course, my desire for chocolate and sweets at a young age added to other issues growing up…cavities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Which also led to my mother\u2019s next occupation. She went into dentistry as a dental assistant. Needless to say, I didn\u2019t pick my mother up from work for that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Taste of Chocolate My mother worked at Fanny Farmer\u2019s chocolate factory when I was young. The factory itself was within walking distance of our house. My favorite activity when I was old enough (around 9 or 10) was to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[324,323,67,177],"class_list":["post-2692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-stories","category-story-writing","tag-chocolate","tag-fanny-farmer","tag-harvey-heilbrun","tag-writing-prompt"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2692"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2697,"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2692\/revisions\/2697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hdhstory.net\/Storyblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}