AV Geeks 16mm Lunch 7-26-2024 

Thanks to all at A/V Geeks for bringing these gems to light!

While watching the chocolate film, I noticed how the machinery was lacking safety guards around the moving parts(I wondered about the hygiene, too!). Then the very next film was a factory safety film! So cool!

As a long-time Hershey resident and (short term) employee of the Hershey Chocolate Factory, I watched the chocolate film with great interest. Skip said he had no idea where it is from, and I have to agree. I recognized most of the equipment in the video from my tenure at Hershey, in 1979, some of it in different sizes and shapes, but it would have been common for all chocolate manufacturers at the time. The roasters are exactly like ones I found in a 1934 Hershey history book, and I remember seeing them, unused, when I was there in 1934, but I think all large chocolate manufacturers would have had them at the time. The same with the mills Hershey had 3-high mills, and there is a picture of them in the book, but so would every other chocolate maker. I asked the Hershey Community Archivists what they thought about the film and one said she thinks it is NOT Hershey. She did suggest the Baker Chocolate company as a possibility. It was also a large chocolate company in the 1920s. A bit of online research turned up little to prove or disprove that. Some things that make it NOT be Hershey Chocolate ,to me, are: The tempering process--Hershey used rollers but as far as I know, not full of chocolate for tempering; the conches--Hershey did have what they called one-pot conches before they had much larger ones, but they had rounded tops and the roller brackets were different (there is an image of one in the 1934 book), and finally the 10-lb bar molds had no embossed name on them--all of the ones I have seen had HERSHEY'S embossed in the metal. Also, by the 1920s, while Hershey was making chocolate in 10 lb bars for resell to candy makers (Mars, of M&M fame was a large buyer of them), if they had made a film of chocolate making they would have shown the consumer sized bars rather than resale bars. I am hoping to hear more from the Hershey Archives, but feel it will not be definitive. If someone wanted to contact Bakers, which is part of Heinz now, they might have something to say.

24:00-That kid mooned James Brill!

Now he's known as 3-finger-Schultz