Katharine Weber - True Confections: A Novel

For Barbara Findeisen, Bright Star!

AFFIDAVIT

I, Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, a resident of New Haven, County of New Haven, State of Connecticut, do hereby certify, swear or affirm, and declare that I am competent to give the following declarations concerning the history of Zips Candies of New Haven, Connecticut, based on my expertise and personal experience derived from thirty-three years of dedicated employment, and as a shareholder in the Ziplinsky Family Limited Partnership, as well as my personal history as it pertains to the Ziplinsky family and Ziplinsky family business practices, before, during, and after my thirty-three years of marriage to Howard Ziplinsky, as the mother of Jacob Ziplinsky and Julie Ziplinsky, as the former sister-in-law of Irene Ziplinsky Weiss, and as the daughter-in-law of the late Samuel Ziplinsky and the late Frieda Ziplinsky, and I do hereby certify, swear or affirm, and declare that all of my information is based on my personal knowledge and experience, unless otherwise stated, and that the following matters, facts, and things are true and correct to the best of my knowledge:

O N MY FIRST DAY of work at Zips Candies, it took five minutes for me to learn the two-handed method for separating and straightening the Tigermelts as they were extruded eight at a time onto the belt that carried them toward the finishing chocolate-striping applicator tunnel. The necessary reach-shuffle-reach-shuffle Tigermelt-straightening gesture was demonstrated for me with condescending efficiency, with the belt running at half speed, by the irritable Frieda Ziplinsky, whose husband, Sam, had just hired me that morning, an impulsive act on his part that she would regret audibly every few weeks for the next thirty-three years. In the sixth minute, I had my first glimpse of my future ex-husband.

Across the whirring, clanking, chugging, sugar-caked Zips Candies factory floor, there appeared Howard Ziplinsky, emerging feetfirst from the large, rotating drum used to tumble the Little Sammies in the thin hard-shell chocolate coating, just a little more brittle than a Raisinets, that gave them their signature sheen.

That Little Sammies panning drum was one of the original machines still running on the Zips lines that hot summer of 1975. It finally wore out beyond repair six years later, in late August 1981, an unforgettable time for me personally as well as a notable event in the history of Zips Candies. I had just begun to be plagued with morning sickness, but Howard and I hadnt yet revealed to anyone that I was pregnant with our first child, Jacob. I was working long, exhausting, split-shift days that summer, supervising the first and third shifts to meet Halloween orders, when the Little Sammies panning drum seized up for the last time. We had shut down the line twice that week because of fruit-fly infestations (the eggs probably came in with a contaminated batch of peanuts for the Tigermelts), which had required cleaning every piece of equipment on the line, including internal mechanisms. The gear shaft on the drum motor was probably insufficiently relubricated when the line started up yet again, and it broke down irreparably on that last Thursday night of August, just as the third shift was starting, causing the disastrous Little Sammies shortage of Halloween 1981.

Replacement parts for that panning drum had been fabricated as needed for thirty years, but by 1981, the very last known functioning machine capable of making those parts had become obsolete and worn out as well. The fabricatorBud Becker, an elderly retired machinist who operated out of his Hamden basement (by then he was the last living member of the original startup crew on the Zips lines when Eli Czaplinsky opened his doors in 1924)had thrown in the towel when he couldnt get the parts for his machine that made the parts for our machine. He was eighty-three, and for fourteen years Zips had been his only customer.

A new panning drum, the one that still runs on the Little Sammies line today, was rush-ordered from Holland, making it the first-ever custom-built mechanism to grace the Zips floor. (It would remain the most expensive single production-line element for several years, until the cost was surpassed by the overdue replacement of the entire Tigermelt line, from batch tables to wrapping machines, with some slightly newer used equipment, in 1989.) Those lost seven weeks before the new Little Sammies panning drum was installed on the line were a disaster. We even tried hand-dipping on jury-rigged enrobing frames in finishing trays, the way Little Sammies were manufactured at the very beginning, in 1924, in those first months when Eli was still developing and refining his cherished candy inventions, well before Little Sammies were distributed beyond New Haven. But there was no chance we could duplicate the finish and gloss of the panned Little Sammies, and all we did was waste product and man-hours, because it is, of course, impossible to get that thin, hard, chocolate-shell coating onto Little Sammies any other way.

Imagine trying to finish M&Ms or Reeses Pieces by hand. What we produced was perfectly good candy, but they were just little fudgy chocolate-covered figures, probably a lot like the earliest versions of Zips signature candy. So it was useless. They werent remotely like what people expect when they open a pack of Little Sammies.

I dont know if it is obvious even now just how catastrophic this was for Zips at the time. Little Sammies sales have carried more than half of Zips annual gross for decades, and almost three quarters of annual Little Sammies sales occur in that all-important zenith of candy-selling seasons, from back-to-school through Halloween. It was only the advent of the protein-bar contract work that changed Zips dependence on Little Sammies. The Detox bar and Index bar lines have grown ever more significant for us in recent years. Every time I look at our balanced books I thank God for our nations ongoing glycemic-index obsession.

That interruption on the Little Sammies line was a true crisis. Howard and I had been married for six years by then, and I had never before seen him cry, not even when his grandmother died just ten days before our wedding. We got through it, and I thought at the time that if we could survive the Little Sammies Halloween shortage of 1981, we could survive anything, but I was wrong.

I HAVE BEEN instructed by Charlie Cooper, my attorney, to tell my story in as clear and detailed a way as possible, from the beginning, though what a lawyer means by clear and detailed and from the beginning is probably very different from what I prefer to make of those requirements for this account. So my recollection of events begins on the humid summer day that was the twelfth of July, 1975, when I applied for the job at Zips out of the blue.

I say out of the blue because it really was just that, the consequence of picking up a discarded section of the New Haven Register to leaf through while I dawdled over my toasted corn muffin and coffee at the counter at Clarks Dairy, on Whitney Avenue, where I had taken to lingering each morning after I fled my familys house, my hair still wet from the shower. A classified ad with the heading Dats Tasty! in the Help Wanted pages jumped out at me.

I had just been graduated from Wilbur Cross High School, where Miss Grace Solomon, my favorite English teacher, had instructed me in correct usage, which is why I just wrote been graduated instead of graduated. Because whether or not I have a college degree, I consider myself to be a perfectly well-read and educated person with as good a command of language as any college graduate I know, including a certain member of the Ziplinsky family who considers herself to be quite educated indeed after those four years in Providence at that university named for those slave-trading Brown brothers.