More than Chocolate:
A Story for Valentines Day
Well over a $1 billion worth of milk chocolate will change hands as lovers and others celebrate Valentines Day today across the country. As we pick through heart-shaped boxes we have Milton S. Hershey the Chocolate King of the 1890s to thank for this sweet tradition. He brought milk chocolate to America and made it cheap enough for the masses. For decades no matter what name was on the box it was likely that Hershey made the chocolate inside, since he shipped the stuff in bulk to most of the big players in the market. But chocolate wasn’t Milton Hershey’s only Valentines Day gift to America. He also left behind one of the great love stories of the Gilded Age.
As a boy, Milton saw little love in his family home. His parents, Henry and Fanny, argued incessantly. Their ultimate separation was so bitter that Fanny would claim that Henry was dead. Not surprisingly, as a young man, Milton devoted himself to business. Until he was forty years old, neighbors, family, and friends in conservative Central Pennsylvania knew him as industrious, sober and hardworking but hardly romantic. They were wrong.
Though restrained at home, Milton Hershey enjoyed all that life had to offer when he traveled the countryside selling his candy and went abroad to borrow ideas that he brought back to America. In New York he knew the best hotels and restaurants. At the casinos in Monte Carlo his wagers won him the nickname Mr. Maximum.
The two sides of the chocolate king finally came together in May of 1897 when Milton arrived home in Lancaster with a woman no one had ever heard of before and announced that she was his wife. Catherine Sweeney aroused suspicion. At twenty-five she was too old to be a blushing bride, and she was Roman Catholic. Upon their introduction, Milton’s mother famously asked, “Tell me Kitty, have you ever been on the stage?”
According to Hershey lore Catherine was not an actress (something akin to a fallen woman at that time) but simply a customer in a candy shop in Jamestown, New York when Milton made a sales call. Captivated by her charm, he secretly courted her and then brought her to New York City where they were married in a private ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
These scant details, and the fact that she was sickly, were all anyone seemed to know. As time passed, and Catherine suffered worsening bouts of weakness and partial paralysis, she was admired for her pluck and delicate beauty. She and Milton traveled the world seeking treatment. He made sure she enjoyed every pleasure his money could buy, including a flower-covered carriage in Nice and an adult-sized tree house at their mansion, accessible by a wheelchair ramp. At the moment when Catherine died in 1916, at the age of forty-two, Milton was fetching her a glass of champagne. He would keep fresh flowers at her grave for the next thirty years. When he died, there were seven pictures of Catherine in his room.
Prior to her death Catherine had conspired with Milton to secretly devote their mutual fortune – today worth $8.5 billion – to the care of orphan children. In the years after she died her reputation grew to the point where she was all but sainted. A ravishing beauty with ill health, unable to have children of her own, she was taken too soon by an unknown disease, but left behind a legacy of love and devotion.
And so the legend remained until, in the course of researching a book, I stumbled upon some new evidence. First there was the suggestion that Milton and Kitty met, not in Jamestown but in Buffalo where her life may have involved work on the stage, or someplace even more scandalous. Then there were the names of Catherine’s doctors, who were experts in the treatment of syphilis, and her diagnosis of locomotor ataxia, which described the end stage of this venereal disease. Catherine, it
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Michael D'Antonio sent the following posts to customers who purchased Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe