On the Side: Hershey took his 1st shot at fame here

On the gun-shop sign, a cop has fired the same pistol into the same silhouette of the same bad guy for years, announcing the presence of Colosimo's, the longtime provider of sidearms to the police - and eventually to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who wanted to carry, regardless, it now appears, of legal status or apparent criminal intent.

The sign still hangs above 935 Spring Garden St., though the feds forced the shop to close last week, saying it sold guns to straw buyers who help the bad guys (some of whom go on to kill cops) procure lethal weapons.

At the curbside, though, is another, decidedly less forbidding sign - a blue-and-yellow historical marker that went up a few months ago: It marks this as the place where Milton Hershey, as a callow 18-year-old, took his first plunge into the candy business.

This is a stretch of Spring Garden not given to promenading these days. And it is difficult to summon the headiness of that moment in 1876. Trash swirls at the curb. Grates cover too many storefronts. The only approximation of a spring garden is a pair of brightly painted murals of a tropical paradise that rise on either side of a weedy lot.

The summer of 1876, when Hershey set up shop, was full to almost bursting with promise. The grand Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition was just under way in Fairmount Park, stretching for hundreds of acres, drawing 10 million visitors.

Young Hershey had figured right. After a day viewing George Washington's trousers, newfangled machinery exhibits, and butter sculptures, thousands of them (ready to spend) would amble by his shop on the way to Independence Hall and other evening diversions.

In fact, though he had nothing to do with the muscular machines at the Centennial, Hershey even had the event's Machinery Building engraved on his business cards.

Nowadays you are confronted on occasion by the stench of filth and decay on parts of Spring Garden. Back then, Hershey rigged a pipe that ran up the coal chute from his basement kitchen, sending clouds of come-hither fragrance over the sidewalk.

There were cafe tables to seat customers inside, Michael D'Antonio recounts in Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams, and copper kettles, and taffy-pulling hooks. There were fruit and nuts and low-profit cakes. (Hershey's encounter with chocolate-making wouldn't come until years later.)

It was a fairy-tale moment, indeed. But it ended unhappily. Within a few years - the crowds gone, the competition fiercely intense, and debts mounting from Hershey's father Henry's ill-advised scheme to manufacture fancy candy display cases - the business staggered, then tanked.

Ten years later, the intrepid Milton would found the Lancaster Caramel Co., making luscious caramels with milk instead of the waxy paraffin common at the time.

It was a huge success, in the bosom of which Hershey started a fledgling milk chocolate company.

How that venture turned out is a little better known than the site of the obscure storefront on Spring Garden Street.

What is even less known is that Hershey had picked up the secret of milk caramels in Denver a few years before when he went to see his peripatetic father, who'd joined the silver rush of the 1880s.

Milton would later tell intimates of an encounter he had with an unscrupulous labor contractor there - an old coot who'd locked him in a back-alley room where he'd gone to inquire about a job.

Hershey was a Mennonite. But in rough-and-tumble boom-town Colorado, he used to carry a pistol.

He pulled it out, leveled it at the man, and demanded to be let out the door - a bit of history, too, but more involved than you can fit on a historical marker at the curb outside a shuttered gun shop.

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