Hoax! (Sagaponacko Chocolate & the Easter Bunny)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

  The more I think about, the more I'm sure.  The entire story's a hoax.
   I was fooled because Dan usually does this stuff for April Fool's, and not 
in August.    Also, his hoax material usually doesn't make the lead story.
   The tipoff is that "Emil Sagaponacko" doesn't have any hits on Google.  
The town name of "Sagaponack" comes  from the Indian word meaning "land of 
the big ground nut."
   The story is at www.danspapers.com/paper/leadarticle.html, but I'll give 
you the whole lyin' deal here, with apologies:
  
  
Our Heritage

The Rise And Fall Of The Emil Sagaponacko Chocolate Factory

By Dan Rattiner

The Hershey Chocolate Company got put up for sale the other day. I don’t know 
if you read about it. The company is a long way from going bankrupt, but it 
is going through hard times. And the trust company, which Milton S. Hershey 
set up years ago and which owns the place, does not wish to risk its 
endowment, which is several billion dollars.

This has come as quite a shock to the residents of Hershey, Pennsylvania, a 
community where just about everybody works at the chocolate factory, and 
where even the street lights are in the shape of Hershey’s kisses. The future 
is uncertain.

Regarding this, it cannot be helped if some local residents here in the 
Hamptons with long memories aren’t giving a chuckle or two about the troubles 
in Hershey. For it was here in the Hamptons that the chocolate business first 
got its start in America. And it was the Hershey Chocolate Company that put 
our company out of business.

The American chocolate industry was founded in 1834 by Emil Sagaponacko, a 
businessman who immigrated to America from Zitz, an eastern European country 
that is presently part of Aberjazan.

Sagaponacko settled in what was then a small forest between Southampton and 
East Hampton and it was here that he built a small chocolate factory, similar 
to the one his grandfather had owned back in the old country. Soon 
Sagaponacko Chocolate was known from coast to coast here in America – it was 
a favorite of Thomas Jefferson – and after just ten years Sagaponacko tore 
down the forest and built the huge factory, now gone, that dominated the 
landscape here in the Hamptons for nearly a century. Sagaponacko was changed 
to Sagaponack. The rest is history.

People remember Emil Sagaponacko, and later his son Boris, as stern, 
hardworking men who believed in hard work and the value of a dollar. Early 
on, the men found an almost unlimited source of cheap labor. Their ships 
would go out to get the chocolate beans, which were grown in South America, 
Africa and Asia, and they would return not only with their holds filled with 
sacks of the fragrant raw material, but with foreigners eager to come to the 
factory to work. For years, the streets of Sag Harbor, the port town where 
the ships came in, were filled with men and women from Fiji, China, Japan, 
India, Russia, Argentina, the African Ivory Coast and Venezuela, who had not 
only picked and packed the beans, but also served as deckhands on the trip to 
their final destination. Many of them, in Sag Harbor, became coopers, 
barbers, tavern owners, gamblers and prostitutes, their chatter filling the 
main street in hundreds of languages, while the smell of chocolate wafted 
over the landscape.

The Sagaponackos, while building a huge mansion on the ocean for themselves – 
it is currently being torn down – housed these people in great corrugated 
metal dormitories where for several generations people lived their lives, 
singing native songs in the evening and, for those on the day shift, taking 
the horse-drawn busses to the factory every morning.

And what a factory it was. Extending for nearly a mile along the ocean in the 
town that was now called Sagaponack, it was twice the size of the adjacent 
Sagaponacko mansion, a structure that looked like a palace where Emil and 
Boris and their wives entertained kings and princes and other members of the 
royal families of Europe.

Chocolate beans went into the barns at one end of the factory, were mashed 
into paste the old-fashioned way – by chanting barefooted foreigners stomping 
on them in great vats – and then sent down an assembly line on leather belts 
to be shaped, stamped, packaged and boxed. Between 1832 and 1890, more than 
4,000 people worked each of the twelve-hour shifts at the plant, turning out 
untold millions of chocolate items, from bars to kisses — yes, Sagaponack 
Kisses wrapped in wax paper – to the pride of the Sagaponacko enterprise – 
the Sagg Chocolate Easter Bunny, which legend has it was invented when Emil 
saw a local rabbit carried off and eaten by one of the many large sea birds 
that inhabit the coastline here.

If the Sagaponackos were hard men with a dollar, Milton Hershey, who worked 
here for a number of years learning the trade before founding his own company 
in Pennsylvania, had a more enlightened approach to employer-employee 
relations. Stung by the way he was treated as a pot scrubber in the 
Sagaponacko household, he vowed to build a chocolate town that would provide 
the workers with schools, libraries, hospitals, museums and minor league 
baseball stadiums so that, when not working, they could find other ways to 
amuse and better themselves. That he succeeded at this is a testament to the 
town he founded, and to the trust he set up for the profits of the company, 
which were to fund these enterprises. Turned out that in the small print of 
this trust, the only thing that the trust had a mandate to protect for more 
than fifty years was the high school. In the announcement this past week, it 
was noted that the high school has an endowment of nearly $2.5 billion, 
making it by far the richest high school in the nation.

As for the Sagaponackos, Boris never married and died a broken man. He 
refused to change with the times and continued to believe that his underpaid, 
undereducated workers could compete with those in Hershey, Pennsylvania, 
until the final creditor came in and took away the giant clock that had been 
erected on the roof of the factory to automatically sound a piercing whistle 
at eight a.m., noon, twelve-thirty and eight p.m., calling the workers of the 
two shifts to their duties. It had been the pride of the company.

The great chocolate factory with its eleven smokestacks stood idle for the 
rest of the nineteenth century until a great fire, started by a bolt of 
lightning, leveled the place in 1901. Today, nothing at all remains in 
Sagaponack of the factory – local children made quick work of the melted 
chocolate bars – and the giant Sagaponacko mansion, vacant for all these 
years, is finally being torn down. You can see the workmen up on the roof 
today, beginning the careful disassembly by taking down the chimneys and the 
roof tiles, all imported from Zitz.

For many years after the factory closed, Sagaponack thrived as a series of 
potato farms – they say the remnants of the chocolate beans gave Sagaponack 
potatoes a very distinctive taste – but in more recent times, the farms have 
given way to large and expensive homes on three and five acre lots – the 
trophy houses of the rich of Manhattan.

Perhaps the best place to get a sense of what it must have been like when 
this community was thriving with the chocolate industry is to go to Sag 
Harbor and see the great widows’ walks on the roofs of the private residences 
there, where the wives of the captains of the fleet of Sagaponacko ships 
paced back and forth, waiting to get the first glimpse of their husbands 
coming through the harbor entrance in their four-masted schooners, flags 
flying, sails flapping and – if the wind was right – preceded by the smell 
of that delicious Sagaponack chocolate.