a glimpse: ray doskus, born 1942.

working with chocolate every day can make you tired of it quickly, ray doskus of lower alsace township learned in his earlier years. he also has a humorous twist at the end of his poem, but that is something you'll have to wait to hear at a poetry reading or see in the first book for this project. the tail-end surprise story, around his chocolate days, involves a trolley and cotton candy. his poem excerpt is below.

*

on moss street in reading, i grew sick of the smell of chocolate

in about two weeks. operating the machines for filling molds

at bortz chocolate, inc. in the 1960s, they started me out at 90

cents an hour.  by the next year, they bumped me up to $1 per

hour. barely 18, i rented a house on those wages for $38 each

month. young people envy those numbers nowadays, but we

had to work hard for even a dollar back then. we had molds

from the size of a penny up to a giant rabbit, a few feet tall.

it wasn’t just big rabbits, although those furry creatures

are probably the easiest to remember. we filled up molds

of ducks and pigs. at holidays, they brought out easter eggs,

turkeys at thanksgiving, reindeer and wide-bellied santas

at christmas. by then, the molds might have moved from 

cast-iron to aluminum alloys. any old mold they didn’t want 

to use anymore—they’d smash into pieces in the back parking 

lot so nobody would steal their designs. history is always 

harder to preserve when worry about proprietary this or that 

is behind even making candy. you had to know the amount

of ounces for any mold you poured, to set the machines right.

if you set a mold to have 8 ounces come down, and it only

needed 3 ounces to fill it all in, you had a mess to clean up.

once, i filled a bunny mold so full that one of the women

carried it away and could barely hold it. we had to melt it

back down before the bosses knew, to not get in trouble.

*

( these tickets are curious artifacts. find out more about them in the full poem 

when the first book for this project is released or at an upcoming poetry reading. )