Chapter 2

A Career for Life

WEDDING MARCH

The year 1920 was a banner one for Carl T. Hammond. On August 2 of that year, he married Laura L. Johnson, the only child of a family from Capitol Hill, which many considered in those days, to be a long way—socially, if not geographically—from North Denver. Carl’s grandchildren don’t know how the two met, but it was probably not a union the Johnsons would have chosen for their daughter. They had come to Colorado from Philadelphia and chosen to live in an affluent community where they spent freely from their inherited money with no other visible signs of support. They undoubtedly enjoyed the society of bankers, lawyers and old Denver merchants rather than that of shopkeepers and factory workers. Like many of their neighbors, they lost their fortune during the Great Depression. Since Carl and Laura Hammond were both Christian Scientists, at least in name, this church affiliation might have been the bridge that spanned their economic divide.

There were two or three Johnson sisters and a brother, and as time went on, they all adjusted to having a relative in “trade.” Carl’s grandsons remember being invited to spend the night, and sometimes the two clans shared holiday celebrations. A favorite family story evolved from a Thanksgiving dinner in the early 1950s when Laura’s Aunt Mary had been invited.

Laura Johnson Hammond at the age of sixteen. Carl T. Hammond III Family Collection.

Carl had a wonderful sense of humor, despite his pragmatic nature, but on this day he was in particularly rare form as he presided at his table and looked down at the large number—about eighteen—of family members gathered for the feast. Aunt Mary, who was over seventy, was very hard of hearing. She tended to talk loudly, and she could hear others as long as she was looking at them. Like many elderly people who won’t admit to needing a hearing aid, she was probably reading their lips. Eight adults would sit at a long table, while Carl presided at the head of the table, carving the turkey onto plates, which were then passed down the table to his guests. This was the first year that Carl III, the eldest grandchild, was big enough to sit at the grown-up table, so he remembers this story well.

While Carl was cutting the turkey, Aunt Mary kept asking over and over, “Why don’t we have goose? We have turkey every year. I think goose would be nice. I don’t understand why we can’t have goose. Why don’t we have goose?”

Carl Sr. and Laura with their first grandson, Carl III, in the garden on Newton Street. Carl T. Hammond III Family Collection.

Carl, with his eyes on the turkey, quietly replied, “If you get me a broomstick, I’ll give her a goose.”

This was greeted with a roar of laughter except from Aunt Mary, who chirped, “What’d he say? I couldn’t hear him. What’d he say? What’d he say?”

No one replied; they were laughing too hard. Carl III was laughing too, but he was too young to know what was so funny. To many of Carl’s associates, this would have been a new glimpse of the man.

Whatever the social differences there might have been, Carl and Laura’s marriage would endure for a lifetime and into the next generations, and it proved to be a partnership that flourished through both business and family life. This was also about the time that Carl bit the bullet and left Brecht. That, too, was the start of a lifetime proposition, for he would never again work for another man or another company and would remain proud of his status as a small businessman for the rest of his life.

DENVER GOOD TIMES

The year 1920 was also a good one for anyone with youth and vigor and creativity and a healthy desire to work. Denver was a thriving city, open to new ideas and anyone who wanted to act on them. Agriculture and ranching were quickly taking the place of mining, and farmers and others employed in the mountains and plains depended on the city, which remained a center for distribution and transportation. But the people also looked to Denver to fill their cultural needs and provide recreation and entertainment.

In 1896, a citizen gave the mayor of Denver a black bear cub that had come to City Park, and at that moment, the Denver Zoo was born. However, it gained true stature and interest with the 1918 opening of Bear Mountain, which was the first institution in the United States to feature animals living in their natural setting. It was a revolutionary idea that is still a beloved attraction at the zoo.¹³ Equally popular and at first showcasing the collections of naturalist Edwin Carter, the Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) attracted families as well as scholars. It, too, was located in City Park, making it easy for people to walk between the two facilities.

In downtown Denver, the Municipal Auditorium had opened in 1908, in time for the Democratic National Convention, and it was not only the largest building of its type west of the Mississippi but was actually second in size nationally only to Madison Square Garden in New York City. Its planners and architects had chosen its design with forethought. With its movable proscenium, its seating capacity ranged from 3,326 to 12,000, depending on how its proscenium was arranged. It was possible to stage concerts, operas or plays, but it was also possible to offer basketball games or even a national convention.¹⁴ Summer theater was a favorite way to end a day at Elitch Gardens, an amusement park that debuted in 1890, when Mary and John Elitch turned their farm on the outskirts of the city into an oasis for urban residents. By 1920, its Trocadero Ballroom featured top bands of the day and offered a chance to dance or just enjoy the music. During the 1990s, Hammond’s Candies operated a retail outlet at Elitch’s near the Trocadero Ballroom.¹⁵

Denver was clearly not a city in the center of the country, but it was central to a large area around it and offered something for almost everyone.

A listing in the 1923 edition of the Corbett and Ballinger directory records that Laura and Carl Hammond resided at 2103 Clay Street and included an additional notation of Walton and Hammond. It might be presumed with the order of the names that Walton put up the capital for this business, although there is very little history about this first endeavor in the Hammond family annals. Many years later, in 1977, an article in the Denver Post quoted Carl Jr. in describing Clendon S. Walton as a bookkeeper.¹⁶ A picture does exist of a windmill-shaped building labeled “Walton and Hammond Ice Cream Factory, 1932,” but this date must have alluded to the time the sketch was made, since the partners had severed their relationship long before that year.

“It was not a successful business,” Carl once told his grandson and namesake, Carl III. Like many entrepreneurial first attempts, it was a lot of work for very little money. “At the end of the day,” he confided again to the same grandson, who was still in junior high school, “I looked in the till, and there was nothing there. I decided that was no way to live, so I closed the business up.”

From that time on, he was truly his own man and his own boss.

“Business Conditions Good” announced a headline in the Rocky Mountain News, citing the experience of J.X. Kennelly, advertising manager of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, as he traveled throughout the western states. It was almost as if he was writing the primer for Carl Hammond’s first foray into business as he cited the example of two tire dealers he called on in the same town. The first was wailing about the dire conditions of business as he sat in his office, complaining that unless things picked up, he would have to find another location. He hadn’t sold one tire that day. On the other side of town, the second dealer had no time to talk to Kennelly because, recognizing the demand for his product, he had promoted it forcefully and had already sold thirty-two tires since opening in the morning.”¹⁷ The newspaper quoted Kennelly further, “Aggressive salesmanship…can usually be depended on to increase sales.”

FIRST FACTORY

Whether Carl ever read that article isn’t pertinent, since he already knew the importance of location and established his first candy factory where there would be plenty of foot traffic and access to a buying public. The North Side Commercial Association had been busily promoting the area for several years.¹⁸ Small manufacturers and retailers of all kinds filled the surrounding streets, including the Schwayder family’s luggage shop, which later gained fame as Samsonite.¹⁹ Across the street, a grocery store and a saloon promised additional patrons, possibly those over-imbibing husbands who might assuage their wives with a guilt offering of a bag of sweets. Fifteenth and Platte is still a busy corner, although the site now serves as the parking lot for REI across the street.

The old fire mixer, used by Carl Sr. in his first factory during the 1930s, is now in the tour office. Photo by the author.

Among the many pitfalls that could entrap novice candy makers were the regulations required by the Pure Food and Drug Act, which became law in 1906 and was amended twice before Carl entered the confectionary market. Of particular concern to him would have been the provisions regarding color additives, a popular method used for increasing eye appeal for candies. Throughout the history of mankind, one can find examples of adulteration of foods or misleading claims, and as early as the middle ages, bakers were fined for adding chalk to their dough to achieve a brighter white appearance. In the fourteenth century, French dairy farmers were prohibited from adding color to butter (reminiscent of the margarine wars centuries later), and as late as the 1880s, a study in Boston found that 46 percent of candy sampled contained at least one toxic mineral pigment. Horrifyingly, it was predominantly lead, and during the nineteenth century, almost all food contained some kind of contaminant. Some people even refused to drink milk, since much of it had been tinged with lead chromate that colored it with a yellowish cast, artificially making it appear richer and creamier and more like its actual counterpart. All that was changed by the federal law of 1906, but in 1899, the National Confectioners’ Association had already advised its members to discontinue use of twenty-one specific color additives. Advances in chemistry, which had alerted the manufacturers as well as the buying public to the dangers of many food additives, had also underlined the greater possibilities of liability and prosecution in the case of adulterated foods. The act specifically forbade the use of colors or stains that might conceal inferior or damaged products.²⁰

But the Pure Food and Drug Act covered much more than what a manufacturer intentionally added to his products, as one unwary Denverite learned to his dismay when he was unexpectedly visited by a state pure food commissioner. The news report described the premises of the Curtis Street candy man as “filthy, full of cats and excrescence of every description.” He was arrested and later pleaded not guilty. It should be noted that this transgression took precedence over the variety of assaults, larcenies and burglaries listed in the same news article.²¹

Advertising, although prevalent in the popular magazines and newspapers of the time, reached many fewer citizens before the advent of the radio, so wily merchandisers tried a variety of maneuvers to lure consumers into their shops. One ploy, apparently popular from New York to the West Coast, was the use of the candy board, which some likened to a form of gambling. The basic form was simply a board containing a number of paper-covered holes. Players would pay for the opportunity to punch open a hole in the board, behind which was a small numbered slip. If the numbered slip matched the number printed on the front of the board, then the buyer won whatever prize corresponded with the number. In Denver in 1920, candy punchboards were popular with both store owners and their customers—the former viewed them as an important trade stimulant, and the latter enjoyed them as an inexpensive game of chance. But this was an era that also spawned Prohibition, and the more cautious of citizens sought to have punchboards banned for fear of instilling a love of gambling in children. An agreement between the Western Candy Manufacturers’ Association and Mr. Frank M. Downer, manager of safety and excise, solved this problem with a provision that the boards could not be used in stores within two blocks of any school.²² This readiness for compromise provided a more comfortable climate for conducting business than existed in other parts of the country such as Jackson, Michigan, where Chief of Police Sam Nunnery instructed his men to arrest anyone who operated candy boards in the future.²³ There was much to learn besides candy making for anyone seeking to make it a profitable career.

But in the long run, candy was just candy, delicious to eat and wonderful to make. Candy was big business for everyone—and profitable as well. It made a wonderful gift; it could be bought on the way home from school; it tasted good. In addition to the favorable climate for making candy, Colorado also offered the ideal conditions for growing its chief ingredient, sugar. There was plenty of irrigation water available, and the soil was rich.

COLORADO SUGAR BEETS

In the early twentieth century, Charles Boettcher and partners recognized this when they founded the Great Western Sugar Company in northeastern Colorado with the first sugar mill in Loveland, Colorado. By 1920, newspaper articles made clear that this had become a thriving industry with an estimated tonnage of 1,738,000 for the ten sugar factories that formed the company. At twelve dollars per ton, that meant prosperity for farmers raising the beet crop, and it also meant jobs for the several hundred men and women who left Denver each fall to take advantage of the seasonal work. Before mechanization arrived to simplify harvesting the crop, Swedish immigrants as well as German-Russians constituted the main labor force in the fields. As early as 1902, Great Western was recruiting workers from the more southern states, as well as Mexico, adding important cultural and societal changes to the state.²⁴

To someone unfamiliar with the production of sugar from beets, a Denver Post headline that read “Sugar Factories Will Slice Beets”²⁵ might seem misleading, for this step, which follows the harvest, in no way leads to the food a family might find on its dinner plate. In appearance more elongated than globular like its deep red cousin, production of sugar from this plant is a complicated procedure. Following the slicing step, which reduces the roots to thin chips, the beets are put through an extraction process that produces a sugar solution called juice and then pressed and cleaned through another step called carbonatation; they are then boiled down to form the sugar crystals that are finally ready for commercial distribution. In this way, sugar beets differ greatly from sugar cane, which visitors to a sugar plantation in Central America or just a few southern states can enjoy just by chewing on the cane. In the end, both types of sugar can be used for candy making, just as both are sold for individual consumption. For Colorado confectioners, moreover, the proximity of this local sugar beet industry translated into large cost savings for them since their transportation charges were greatly reduced. It was advantageous to the sugar growers that a byproduct, beet molasses, could also be sold to ranchers for cattle feed or sent to fermentation plants to produce alcohol.

CANDY TIPS

Carl’s tenure at Brecht’s Candy had introduced him to the mechanics of his new career, but working for a large company is critically different from becoming the manager who makes all the decisions. Now he controlled the purchasing, manufacturing, accounting and sales, but most important to his success was acquiring the not-so-simple understanding of how to run the trade.

In addition to hands-on learning, there were already a number of trade magazines and manuals, and large confectioners joined the National Confectioners’ Association, one of the oldest trade organizations in the world. It is doubtful that the fledgling Hammond Candy Company subscribed to this group, but Carl could easily have read other available materials. Jake Friedman’s Common Sense Candy Teacher (Express Prepaid ten dollars) guaranteed to make money for you hand over fist, assuring its purchasers that it was as beneficial to business “as a spring tonic to a man.” It covered just about every imaginable kind of candy from crystal work to pearled seeds, listed a variety of possible formulae and contained valuable pointers to the employer and workman.²⁶ Another more reasonably priced handbook costing five dollars—perhaps because it was manually typed rather than printed—was available from Candymakers Supply House in Philadelphia. Entitled Professional Candy Manufacturing, Formulas and Secrets of Candy Makers, its opening paragraph stated, “Candy is one of the most staple articles on the market and the candy trade in this country has grown to enormous importance, and as the country increases in size and prosperity the opportunities for making money in the candy business become greater and greater. The reason for this is that candy is bought by old and young, rich and poor, and that it has no seasons, but sells equally well the entire year round.” Although the booklet is undated, the directions for a Yellow Jack Bar suggested a selling price of five cents for a two-ounce bar, while the Chop Suey candy recipe was valued at forty cents per pound. Among its most unusual offerings was the method for producing Sauer Kraut candy, but that might have reflected the German heritage found in the Pennsylvania community of its publication. A list of important utensils for the beginner candy maker to own included a large pot, a good-sized spoon and a flat, shallow pan for cooling the candy. The instructions included definitions for the hard and soft ball stages, as well as how to perform a water test. It also warned of the “danger point” at which the confection was close to burning. These last directives were added in the event that the new cook had neglected to buy a candy thermometer, which only the most experienced confectioner could safely ignore. Perhaps the most important advice appeared implicitly in the statement, “The main difficulty with most people in starting a candy business is that they try to make too many different kinds.”²⁷

Whether Carl ever resorted to a similar trade book, it is interesting to realize that such basic information is about as true today as it was almost one hundred years ago when Hammond’s started. Carl certainly overcame the admonition in the book regarding “they try to make too many different kinds” as he developed the unique skills to successfully make and sell over 150 different items, from chocolates to hard candies and everything in between.