Flashback 2006: Skipping into candy land

Vandal Gummy, Red, by WhisBe

      The Ferrara Candy Company announced last week it is moving its headquarters, and 400 employees, from Oak Brook Terrace to Chicago, specifically the Old Post Office, which is finally getting its long-awaited overhaul, after years as one of Chicago's most recalcitrant white elephants. 

     That reminded me of my visit to their Forest Park factory, a dozen years ago, and I dug it out of the archives. 

     Do you know how they make gummy bears? Of course you don't. You probably think they use metal molds to form the little squishy ursine confections. Ha! Of course not. The actual process is . . . Well, I'm not sure I should tell you. Because it's so staggeringly cool, maybe it should be a secret only a few of us really plugged-in cool guys know about. . .
     I didn't learn the secret of gummy bears until I went through Ferrara Pan Candy Co. in Forest Park. A dream of mine, to visit the home of Lemonheads and Red Hots and Atomic Fire Balls (There's an un-PC candy name for ya!) and gummy bears and sour gummy worms, which are made . . . no, no, not yet!
     The production line is vertical—that is, it uses gravity to cut down on the need for pumps. Sugar and corn syrup and flavorings and colorings start at the fifth floor, then are blended and mixed and cooked on lower levels, which feature tons and tons of a certain white granular staple.
     "One thing you've got to have is lots of sugar," said John Conversa, the plant manager, showing off one of a pair of two-story sugar silos, 16 feet across. "I believe this one holds 600,000 pounds."
     Sugar—or more precisely, our government's shortsighted and punitive sugar tariffs—have driven many Chicago candy companies to Mexico.
     Family-owned Ferrara Pan stays here, although it does have factories south of the border, and its more, shall we say, sugar-intensive candies are made there, such as Atomic Fire Balls, which are basically pure sugar with a heart of plutonium-239 (joking; they only taste that way).
     Not that sugar aplenty isn't being used at Forest Park; the factory goes through 200,000 pounds—the contents of a single rail car—every day.
     The dynamics of the plant are interesting enough to fill up three columns. Parts look just like a ship's engine, all pipes and retorts and gauges. What they're basically doing is removing moisture, taking liquid ingredients and cooking and drying them until the result is a miniature distillate of sweetness and flavor.
     Much of that flavor is sourness, which means acidity, and, as Conversa says, "Acid is very hygroscopic," meaning it draws water, so keeping tabs on the water content of the candy is very important.
     An extra 2 percent of moisture is the difference between a jelly bean that will sit happily on the shelf for years and one that will immediately begin to break down—"sweat" is the candy maker's term. Sweating candy is bad.
     Jelly beans, incidentally, are built up like pearls, around a center, a process known lyrically as "engrossment."
     They actually use three different types of sugar, increasing in fineness, to get the hard sheen on the outside, the way you would switch to finer sandpaper to finish a wooden desk.
     But I was going to tell you how they mold gummy bears. No, not a metal mold—imagine trying to pry a warm, sticky gummy worm out of THAT. No, they take corn starch, mixed with a bit of oil to make it clump like wet snow.
     Machines spread the beige starch in a low tray, then take a plate bearing hundreds of little steel bears and press their shapes into the starch, the way wet sand forms footprints. Then the trays slide under hundreds of little spigots—the whole place is automated—and the nozzles blurp just enough sweet/sour liquid to fill each bearlike impression. The candies are set aside to harden, then the trays are flipped over, the nascent gummy bears have their cornstarch steamed off, and are on their way to be packaged for their rendezvous with your mouth.
     Like most kids, I have an innate preference for the chocolate family of candies. But going through Ferrara Pan gave me appreciation for the whole sour/gummy subgenus.
     They truly are a wonder and, more so, a Chicago wonder.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 30, 2006

The Saturday Snapshot #19

    
     I saw this photo and just gasped: hoarfrost on a stand of trees, taken a couple years ago by Tom Peters from Steger-Monee Road, just north of Momence.
     "I deliver flowers for a shop in Beecher so I spend a lot of time on country roads in the southland," Tom writes.
     Somehow, even the idea of flowers being delivered in rural areas jostles with our preconceptions. I'd think that the close-to-the-soil types would grow their own, or be too practical to pony up for a bouquet. But upon reflection, that can't be true. 
     What really makes this photo, in my opinion, is the use of color. The line of white trees cutting across it. The faint green of the grass, just barely pushing through the frost in the foreground. And then, off to the left, the pop of that deep, lucious, soul- renewing red, like a ruby set amidst a palmful of snow. 

Grab a squeegee; cleaning up after Trump will not be easy

     “Government is like a pump,” Adlai Stevenson said during the presidential campaign of 1952. “And what it pumps up is just what we are, a fair sample of the intellect, the ethics, and the morals of the people, no better, no worse.”
     That’s true, sadly, though a hard truth to stomach in the era of Trump. Eww, yuck. Where did that come from?
     Oh, right; it came from us. Half of us anyway, nearly.
     We’ve become so accustomed to this daily spew of presidential bile: rage tweets, bald lies, outrageous claims, the whole wretched vomitorium, that it’s easy to become frozen in the moment, staring transfixed at today’s slurry, bubbling up from the depths, hardly daring to hope that at some point in the indeterminate future the man is going to be booted off the stage.
     And then what?
     Cue the celebration, right? Like the end of a Star Wars movie: trumpets blaring, banners flapping, Ewoks dancing, Luke and Leia exchanging coy smiles.
     That’s what people seem to anticipate, with growing expectation, as Robert Mueller picks off Trump’s confederates one-by-one, and the bloodhounds of justice bay, closer and closer. The end is in sight!

     Pretty to think so. If you are feeling that way, well, spoiler alert. You might want to stop reading here.
     As comforting as it is to imagine that all our problems will be over, that, alas, is as much an illusion as The Donald's claim that electing him would make all our dreams come true. Trump is a symptom, not a cause, and the same knee-knocking fear, moral rot and intellectual dishonesty that heaved him from the bowels of our national experience will disgorge a new version. Maybe even a more dangerous one. Another hard lesson of our era is that there is no shortage of men ready to betray their country and its ideals for adulation and power. The pump is still chugging. Who knows what it will dredge up next?
     What to do? Stevenson never got to be president. He was the original egghead, a term coined in tribute to his bald dome. I won't portray that as a tragedy. He had a certain smug, fey, self-satisfied quality that rubbed people the wrong way.
     We need to avoid that. Stevensonian superiority is a trap that even he recognized. During that 1952 election, in Chicago, he said: "Government in a democracy cannot be stronger or more tough-minded than its people. It cannot be more inflexibly committed to the task than they."
     And that task is? To look beyond Trump, to the heart of the problem: his supporters. To coax them away from the Trumpian nightmare and back to the American dream. It won't be easy. The first step is understand them. They are not evil, they are not stupid, necessarily. Dismissing the Right the way it dismisses the Left, as traitors and idiots, is not helpful. Then how? Since Trump is a con-man; it might help us to consider them The Defrauded.
     Think of an elderly person who gives her life savings to a Nigerian prince. Why? Because he reached out to her and offered her a vision—a cool $20 million USD, in an aluminum suitcase.
     When you sit Aunt Betty down, and tell her the bad news—your money's gone, there is no prince—sure, she might respond with appropriate shock, regret and embarrassment. But that requires a savvy that would have shielded her from this folly in the first place.
     More likely, she grabs the checkbook back, screams "NO!" It is you who are lying, saying these awful things about Prince Haruum. The dream is not easily surrendered.
     And before you scorn that person, look at your own life. Being clear-sighted isn't difficult when the view is nice. If you have a good job and a supportive spouse and acceptable kids and a not-bad house, then sure, those clutching at a con can seem inexplicable. For many Americans, Trump's slimy, bogus dream, his goose-stepping superiority, is all they have, and if you're going to laugh as their dream turns to ash, well, where is that empathy you are so proud of?
     Like any patriotic American, I'm looking forward to the day when Trump and his cohort are squeegeed into the storm drain. When that happens, the really hard work will begin: dealing with his duped followers.

Void filler

     My sense of humor can be ... odd at times.
     We finally got chairs for the kitchen, to replace the counter height quartet that, after 15 years of sledgehammer onslaught from Steinberg posteriors, had begun to wobble. The new chairs, from Pottery Barn, came individually packed, carefully wrapped in styrofoam sheeting. The space between the chair back and the seat was filled with these smaller boxes, each box empty and labeled "VOID FILLER" I suppose to prevent customers from assuming that something was supposed to be inside and then complaining that whatever they imagined wasn't there.
     "This is just what we need!" I exclaimed to my wife. "I felt an absence ... I couldn't put my finger on it. And now we have this!"
    With the boys away in law school, well, I'll admit, a chunk of life seems missing. I didn't want to complain—with the real losses and tragedies happening every day, the less said about this lacuna, the better. All is as it should be.
    Still ... the void was real. It would manifest itself toward dinner times where I might—or might not—wanly inquire of the wife, "Hear from the boys?" 
    And she would say yes, she had gotten an email from this or that boy about this or that concern. A couple pebbles to suck on for a day's trudge through the empty nest desert. 
    Often not even that. Nope, nothing, they're busy, I'm busy, we're all busy, beavering away at our work. Which fills the void nicely, except when it doesn't. And for that, I have these convenient boxes. 
     Actually, I don't. My wife took one look at them. "Ha ha," she said, and instructed me to dispose of them. Which I did. 

If I win that Banksy, will I own it, or will it own me?

     Who are the most important artists in the world?
     No, this isn't a trick question. Though I wouldn't blame you for sensing a trap and responding: "Nobody. None of them are important." Because if poetry, in the much-quoted phrase of Auden's, "makes nothing happen," that goes double for art, hung in galleries, traded for money, admired and revered, but essentially outside the slipstream of human history, with its wars and hunger and scrabble up the greased pole.
     That stipulated, you could still list those who are a big noise in the art world and thus considered them important: Damien Hirst, with his cows in formaldehyde; Jeffery Koons, of giant chrome inflatable bunny fame (I hope that last phrase is as fun to read as it was to write).
     Had you asked me, I'd have said, "Banksy," the London graffiti artist turned global trickster. But I've been asking everyone I run into if they've heard of Banksy and most haven't. Can you be important if people don't know who you are? Sure, ask Tim Berners-Lee, inventor, in 1989 of something that came to be called the World Wide Web.
     Who is Banksy? An anonymous, more or less, British graffiti artists whose stencil wall paintings hit a sweet spot between spare beauty and pointed social commentary. A dove in a flak vest on a wall in the occupied territories. Security forces going through Dorothy Gale's wicker basket. A masked protester hurling a bouquet of flowers.
     His work is also a running commentary on artistic value, an essential subject in a world where a supposed Da Vinci can draw $450 million at auction. Banksy paints on buildings, mostly, in essence giving his work away. Some building owners paint them over, while others break out concrete saws and cut them out. There's a fascinating documentary, "Saving Banksy" about what happens after the artist does a spate of paintings in San Francisco.

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"Rogers Park without the Heartland seems absurd"

Nicholas Tremulis

     Honestly: we rarely go to the Heartland Cafe as a destination in itself. The groats-and-granola menu put it in a distant orbit in our culinary universe, as did its rough, we-slapped-this-together-the-weekend-before-we-opened decor. 
     But I do have a habit of being called there, either to meet people we're joining for an evening at the nearby, excellent Lifeline Theater or, in the 2009 column below, hunting an elusive Facebook friend.
     So while not exactly a fan, I thought I would acknowledge the sadness felt by aficionados of the place, which Block Club reports is closing at the end of the month, by reposting this encounter with local musician Nicholas Tremulis. The good news is that he is still rocking: he'll do a Christmas show at the Blue Nocturne (the lower level of the Chopin Theater) 1543 W. Division, on Dec. 16. 
     I thought I'd catch up with him, and ask for his thoughts on Heartland closing. He replied:

     Some places, you just equate with the neighborhood they reside in. Rogers Park without the Heartland seems absurd; like your parents getting a divorce. This was a place where radical, pinko-commie hippy/punks could meet to plan a little subversive action back in the day. Those who walked the talk. Another landmark of the left disappears. Seems fitting to me that the only other time I played there was to backup John Sinclair reading poetry. Goodbye to the oldest beatnik in Chicago.

     'I'm looking for a boisterous Norwegian woman," I explained to the maitre d' at the Heartland Cafe.
     "Well, there are a lot of women here," she said, gesturing to the dark, crowded bar, where the clientele did indeed skew female. "Whether they're Norwegian or not . . . "
     Earlier, my wife and I had been downtown, at Harry Caray's Italian Steakhouse, where Dutchie Caray, Harry's sposa cara, was given a surprise 80th birthday party Saturday night ("Do you think it's a good idea to surprise an 80-year-old?" I wondered beforehand. "I mean, could it be dangerous?") Dutchie took the shock in stride -- sharp as a tack, she of course knew something was up, but expected a family gathering, not the hundreds of friends who turned out.
     After 90 minutes of coconut crab risotto and conversation, my wife and I couldn't resist the temptation to head north. My earthy Norwegian Facebook pal, Gry Haukland, whom you might recall reading about last spring, is visiting Chicago, a development that initially alarmed my wife, until I explained that she's staying with Lee Klawans, a fellow she met on my Facebook page. The happy couple let me know they'd be listening to music at the Heartland in East Rogers Park, and that seemed reason aplenty to swing by.
     We scanned the bar and saw no one radiating Gry's striking Nordic beauty. We did, however, find Nicholas Tremulis, on the small stage in the back room at the Heartland, playing without a band. His name sparked a flash of recognition, the pale gleam of a WXRT-stoked local celebrity from 25 years ago. "Let's stay," I told my wife. "We're already here. The cover charge is only seven bucks. "
     Tremulis cut a curious figure—his pants a shade of light orange associated with children's aspirin, a brown leather jacket over a well-filled maroon shirt, thin mustache, goatee, dangly ball earrings in both ears and a giant newsboy cap. The get-up would look fey on a trim 20-year-old, but on a guy my age, or maybe a few years older, well, let's say that it put the oft-humbling trade of professional journalism into a more attractive light. There are hells below mine. Tremulis was playing the most beat-up, cheapest-looking nylon-stringed guitar I've ever seen in the hands of a working musician.
     But the songs were good—"I Can't Stand the Rain" by Tina Turner, whom he once opened for, "Sweet Dreams," by Patsy Cline—and we stayed until he ended his set.
     "This is a tune I usually play for really drunk people," he said, scanning the crowd of tea drinkers at the Heartland. "But I don't see any."
     I think it was his battered toy guitar that affected me, coupled with the knowledge that we've both been kicking around Chicago for the past quarter century, playing our modest songs with less success than our fevered dreams of glory might have hoped for. A person could feel bad about that, or a person could feel good, and Saturday night, listening to Nicholas Tremulis, I chose to feel good. Hey, it's a living.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     Nicholas Tremulis reminded me of these stanzas from Emily Dickinson—not quite a joke, but perhaps humorous enough to pass as a chuckle:

     I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there's a pair of us— don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.     How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

—Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 4, 2009

Department of Coffee and Social Affairs

     Philip Johnson's 190 South LaSalle is one of my favorite buildings in Chicago, from its funky, post-modern summit to the vast, gold barrel-vaulted lobby.  It's a whimsical shrine to mammon.
     So when I walk by, I can't help glancing inside. And on Friday, I was rewarded by a view of this oddly-named coffee shop: "Department of Coffee and Social Affairs" For one confused second, I thought it was some kind of Kafkaesque goverment bureau, so perfectly is its quasi-official name suited to the vastness of the building. Though actually it's part of a chain started in London in 2010.
     I had time, and a need for caffeine, so sauntered in. I've been trying to get a good cup of espresso lately—prodded by memories of tiny cups of steaming perfection in Italy—and ordered a cup, just to see what they could do. Not much, I'm afraid. With all the money and creativity expended on the location, the decor and the name, they just couldn't get the ball those last few yards and score on the product itself. The espresso had that familiar wrong note—maybe try a finer grind and longer pull; just a suggestion. Not a complete waste: the clerks were friendly, the room grand enough, a pleasant place to stand and ponder why something the humblest snack bar in Florence can manage to serve up for $1.50 eludes the fanciest American coffee shops charging twice as much. It can't be that hard. Can it? Does anyone know anywhere in Chicago to get a decent cup of espresso? Tell me, please.