Day 7: Utah–Old time candy!
We drove hard all day across Big Sky country, getting stopped way too often by construction. At one long wait a young guy walks up to my window and says Hi, he’s from Detroit, now ski bumming. He wonders about the stickers. I give him one. It’s cute to see him slap it onto his car up ahead.
We’re getting tired. But M was behind the wheel: we have to get to Provo and the 100-year-old Startup Candy Company! It’s going to close any minute now and we call in from the desert on the wonderful cell phone. A guy, who turns out to be the owner, answers and says he’ll stick around a bit longer for us. It’s a candy factory that invented the first filled candy bar and several other long-lived candy treats. It’s in its original building and has been run by many generations of Startups.
We blast through all meddling canyons like they’re nothing. We passengers are delirious van-overdosed blobs but M barrels on. We make it. Mr. Startup seems about my age, early 40’s. But since his business seems possibly viable he’s probably in his late 30’s. (If you spare the stress, you get to live on the street, is starting to be my sense of things.)
Provo seems well-preserved and fairly humane for a big burg. It has great views, too. The little we see of the outskirts shows lots of people riding bikes on well-groomed bikeways. They seem to have outdoor amenities here but less garishness than Colorado.
Mr. Startup is friendly and we sample many things. The kids are sweet and appreciative and on cloud nine without reducing the glee to chaos. We buy a big box of things, mostly for gifts. They do their own box-making and printing and use the same artwork–and printing equipment–as in the 1800’s.
But I’m ahead of myself. The candy and chocolates are great. They use most of the same old equipment to make all that, too. They even have Magnolias, a flower-flavored candy. It’s perfume candy, little crunchy globes with juicy centers of natural flavoring. You like em or hate em, as Startup said. We liked it. Lovely.
They had such amazing glass-like sculptured candy, too. He said many people got the large (6-10″), brightly colored candy animals, trains and things as their only Christmas presents back in the day, and didn’t mind.
We talk business and family. He’s a fine fellow. But it seems he doesn’t like people to order directly from his website. He doesn’t like mail-order catalogs either. He wants to get to know his customers and have them taste before they buy. Wow. I suspect he mostly does wholesaling. I think he should go direct more accessibly.We say goodbye and wish each other luck, talking about handing biz down to kids.
I’ve never met Pete Vordenberg, my ski racing memoir and culture book author. His book is highly regarded and going great guns. It’s a great project and we’ve had a fine time working together the past year. It’s high time we got together! He’s an Olympic XC ski team coach and we emailed before this trip and planned to meet if we could. He lives in Park City where the Team is HQ’ed. We talked by cellphone on and off. Things were shaky as he was just getting back from LA. But it looked like we could meet for breakfast the next day. We got a motel, our first, and collapsed. Oh, we had a campstove dinner alongside Bridalveil Falls as we slowly drove back through the canyon outside Provo after letting Startup go home. We’d had one restaurant meal so far (breakfast in Boulder).
To me, it seemed like we now started to move too fast. We were hurrying to make it to the Bay Area to meet our friends before their kids left. But without a couple painful spells of bleery dashing we would not have finished the whole nutty trip in a month. And in the end it seemed like it was all a blur, with a couple slower blurs tossed in.
(Henry gets a nervy idea and bravely tackles the Falls, for a couple minutes.)
