Moody’s Investors Service reveals new home sales made up 14% to 15% of total transactions over the last three quarters, up from 10% in pre-pandemic years. They project new home prices will dip 10% this year and 4% more in 2024.

Analysts at nSkope (a predictive real estate service) report: “Real estate has returned to a lifestyle-driven market. Those who seemingly want more (or less) space, and access to better schools along with job or relationship-driven moves are driving listing inventory.”

Data firm Black Knight says, “August marked the second consecutive month in which annual home price appreciation trended higher in every one of the 50 largest U.S. markets, mirroring the sharp reacceleration we’re seeing at the national level.”

“No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.” Calvin Coolidge

“A Young Marine Restores My Faith”

It was our normal Thursday morning business meeting at our real-estate office. No big deal. Before the meeting we hung around the bagel table, as usual, with our coffee.

He stood aside, looking a little shy and awkward and very young, a new face in a room full of extroverted salespeople. An average looking guy, maybe 5 feet 8 inches. A clean-cut, sweet-faced kid. I went over to chat with him. Maybe he was a new salesman?

He said he was just back from Kabul, Afghanistan. A Marine. Our office (and a local school) had been supportive by sending letters to him and other tro ops, which he had posted on the American Embassy door in Kabul where he stood guard.

He had come to our office to thank us for our support, for all the letters during those scary times. I couldn’t believe my ears. He wanted to thank us? We should be thanking him. But how? How can I ever show him my appreciation?

At the end of the sales meeting, he stepped quietly forward, no incredible hulk. As a matter of fact, he looked for all the world 15 years old to me. (The older I get, the younger they look.)

This young Marine, this clean-faced boy, had no qualms stepping up to the plate and dodging bullets so that I might enjoy the freedom to live my peaceful life in the land of the free. No matter the risk.

Suddenly the most stressful concerns of my life seemed as nothing, my complacency flew righ t out the window with his every word.

Somewhere, somehow, he had taken the words honor, courage and commitment into his very soul and laid his life on the line daily for me and us.

A man of principle. He wants to do it. Relishes it. And he came to thank us? For a few letters? I fought back the tears as he spoke so briefly and softly.

He walked forward to our manager and placed a properly folded American flag in his hands. It had flown over the Embassy. He said thanks again. You could hear a pin drop. As I looked around I saw red faces everywhere fighting back the tears.

In a heartbeat, my disillusionment with young people today quickly vanished. In ordinary homes, in ordinary towns, kids like him are growing up proud to be an American and willing to die for it. Wow.

We’ll frame the flag and put it in the lobby. He only came to my office once, for just a few minutes. But I realize I rubbed shoulders with greatness in the flesh and in the twinkling of an eye my life is forever changed.

His name is Michael Mendez, a corporal in the USMC. We are a great nation. We know because the makings of it walked into my office that day. ~ Ann Baker, Huntington Beach, CA

Cindy Glynn
Coldwell Banker American Home
479-586-6262
agentcindyg@gmail.com

Sales of new homes dipped 8.7% in August, yet they’re still 5.8% ahead of where they were a year ago. Good news for buyers, the median sales price of NEW homes is down 13.4% from its peak late last year.

The August index of signed contracts on existing homes slipped 7.1% from July. The National Association of Realtors noted, “Some would-be home buyers are taking a pause and readjusting their expectations.”

The national Home Price Index by Case-Shiller accelerated in July after stagnating in June, and has now reached a new all-time high. The lack of supply amidst stable demand has continued to put upward pressure on prices.

“The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.” ~ William James

My poem, “The Dash”, is based on that little line on a tombstone, between the dates of birth and death.

Ultimately, that dash is a symbol which represents every day we’ve spent alive on earth. Therefore, how you spend your “dash” is all that really matters.

Following is an amazing story about someone whose dash truly made a difference.

Recently I heard about a little girl named Hope Stout. After learning more about her life, I couldn’t help but feel it was not by coincidence, nor happenstance, that she had been named “Hope.”

It had to be attributed to fate. The compassion and generosity housed in her young heart made a lasting impression on me and countless others, and her legacy of love continues to bless lives every day.

She was wise beyond her tender years and very, very special. When I tell people her story, I always say, “if this doesn’t inspire you, I don’t think there’s much that could…”

Hope was a twelve-year old girl who was offered a “wish” in early December 2003 by the “Make-A-Wish” Foundation after being informed that she had a rare type of bone cancer.

However, when she found out that more than 150 children in her area were waiting for their wishes to be granted, she unselfishly used her wish to ask that those children have their wishes granted. She also asked that it be done by January 16, 2004.

Unfortunately, however, the organization informed her that her noble request could not be granted as the funds were simply unavailable. They calculated that they would need to raise more than one million dollars in thirty days in order to grant her wish.

Disappointed, but not discouraged, she turned her dismay into an enthusiasm that inspired caring individuals to spearhead fundraising to help grant the wishes of the other children, and eventually hers as well.

Newspaper columnists and reporters for radio and TV stations shared the story of this caring young girl who had touched the hearts of so many and as word spread, the community was challenged.

Committees were formed and schools, corporations and various organizations assisted in raising money to help bring Hope’s dream to fruition.

Though she lost her battle in 2004, knowing that her wish was going to come true, Hope lives on.

Her heartfelt efforts were not in vain as they continue to help others, not only physically, but spiritually and emotionally as well.

At the initial fundraiser and gathering to celebrate her life, “A Celebration of Hope” on January 16, 2004, the announcement was made that they had indeed received donations totaling more than one million dollars on behalf of Hope Stout.

Her wish had been granted! ~ by Linda Ellis

Cindy Glynn
Coldwell Banker American Home
479-586-6262
agentcindyg@gmail.com

Sales of existing homes dipped a tiny 0.7% in August, the third straight month of declines. Tight inventory is the culprit, both hurting sales and nudging the median price up modestly, now 3.9% ahead of a year ago.

New Housing starts sank 11.3% in August, mostly due to a 26.3% drop in multi-units. Single-family starts are actually up 2.4% the past year, as more buyers turn to new builds. And permits posted a gain, so the future looks good.

Buyer demand continues. The Mortgage Bankers Association reports purchase loan applications rose last week a seasonally adjusted 2.0% versus the week before, the second week in a row of increased mortgage applications.

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On!” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” ~ Calvin Coolidge

He was rejected by more than 130 publishers, but persevered and became a worldwide sensation.

When others might have given up, he just pushed on—just as he advises others to do. “People told Elvis he couldn’t sing. People said the Beatles were no good,” he says.

Jack Canfield’s “Chicken Soup for the Soul”, a collection of 101 inspiring fables, parables and real-life short stories, was finally published in 1993.

Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, his collaborator, fed a grassroots marketing effort that made the book an international best-seller and spawned about 200 spinoffs.

Chicken Soup titles have sold more than 112 million copies and been translated into 40-plus languages.

Canfield says persistence is the single most common quality of high achievers. “The longer you hang in there, the greater the chance that something will happen in your favor. No matter how hard it seems, the longer you persist the more likely your success”.

As founder and chairman of The Canfield Training Group in Santa Barbara, Calif., he has helped more than 1 million people through his personal and professional development seminars.

He draws blueprints and shares techniques for achievement with the unemployed, wealthy executives, struggling and comfortable entrepreneurs, prison inmates, and Mr. and Ms. Average Reader—all who wish to follow their passions to successful, goal-directed lives.

It was Chicken Soup for the Soul that thrust Canfield into the spotlight and, through touching, funny and relatable stories, introduced millions of readers to self-improvement content.

Without teaching or being preachy, the books’ message inspired people to be the best versions of themselves.

Author, television personality and relationship consultant Barbara De Angelis says the power behind Chicken Soup for the Soul is that it “helps us remember the important things in life: love, connection and gratitude.”

Canfield rose to celebrity (he has appeared on Oprah, Larry King Live, Today and numerous other TV shows) from a modest upbringing in Wheeling, W.Va. Education played a large role in his ascension, beginning with an aunt who paid his tuition to a high-quality military school.

“My high school Latin teacher there believed in me and told me to apply to Harvard. I said I wasn’t smart enough, and even if I was, I didn’t have enough money. She said, ‘I think you can get scholarships.’ ”

In true carpe diem spirit, he applied and was accepted to three top universities. “I picked Harvard because it was in a big city and a lot of girls’ schools were nearby. And I liked President Kennedy, who went to Harvard.”

Canfield followed his bachelor’s degree in history with graduate school at the University of Chicago and the University of Massachusetts, where he earned a master’s degree in psychological education.

While in Chicago, he attended seminars and workshops led by Herbert Otto, director of the National Center for the Exploration of Human Potential, and W. Clement Stone, who built an insurance empire by following Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and co-founded SUCCESS magazine.

Canfield, then teaching at an inner-city high school in Chicago, went to the seminars to learn how to motivate his students. But the training inspired him as well.

To help people attain their dreams, he counsels them to write down goals, visualize and share them, find a mentor, persevere, maintain personal balance and continue to learn.

To maintain momentum, he suggests two tactics: monthly mastermind sessions with supportive people who share practical ways to progress and solve problems, and his Rule of Five. “Whatever your No. 1 dream is, every day, do five specific action steps toward your dream. Keep track each day. Have accountability to another person. Get on the phone and share the five actions that you did or didn’t do. It works for me. I can’t stand telling people I didn’t do it.”

Through his books and seminars, Jack Canfield has taught millions of people worldwide. But he credits Inga, his wife of more than 10 years, with teaching him a few things.

“She’s a model for spontaneity and transparency. She’s real. She enjoys life. She taught me to let go, relax, have fun and share my feelings.”

Most important, Canfield says, is that she helps keep him grounded. ~ Mary Vinnedge

Cindy Glynn
Coldwell Banker American Home
479-586-6262
agentcindyg@gmail.com

CoreLogic Home Price Insights showed home prices accelerated in July, up 2.5% annually, after 1.6% yearly growth the prior two months. Prices have now risen annually six straight months, and are 5% above their February low.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, nearly a third of all listings in July were new construction. Historically, new homes have accounted for only about 10% to 15% of the market.

A national real estate investment company’s data revealed many flippers are snatching up vacant, dilapidated homes and renovating them, adding turnkey inventory that is 30% to 40% less expensive than new construction.

It is far better for one man to practice good sportsmanship than for a hundred to teach it. ~ Knute RockneI

When American athlete Jesse Owens arrived at the 1936 Olympic Games, he was under immense pressure. At 22, Owens had broken world records even before making his first Olympic appearance in Germany and the world was eager to catch a glimpse of him.

His staggering tally of four medals at the 1936 Games was his response.

While Owens’ feat was unique, he might have lost one of his gold medals had it not been for the advice from an unlikely ally – German long jumper Luz Long.

Long, who later became a German soldier in the second World War, was tall, blond and blue-eyed – the perfect Aryan attributes according to the Nazi party but it was his friendship with Owens that became a major talking point at the Olympic Games.

Owens clinched his four Olympic medals in the span of three days. He won his races in 100m and 200m comfortably before sealing his fourth gold in the 4x100m relay for his country with a world record.

However, before eventually clinching his medal in the long jump event, Owens was struggling despite being a world-record holder in that discipline. He needed a distance of 23-and-a-half-feet to qualify for the final.

On his first attempt, Owens made a practice run in his tracksuit and landed into the pit, failing to realize that judges had already raised their flags to indicate the start of the competition. This was the first of his failed attempts.

Discouraged, Owens fouled his next attempt too, leaving him with only one final chance to qualify for the final. It was at this crucial juncture that Long walked up to the American.

In what was a fine display of sportsmanship in front of the Berlin crowd, the German suggested Owens change his mark and take off well before the foul line in order to avoid fouling the last attempt.

Heeding Long’s advice, Owens sprinted on his final try and leaped into the air a foot before the foul line. The American jumped a distance of 25 feet on his final try to qualify for the final, alongside Long.

As it turned out, Owens bagged the gold, setting a new Olympic record (8.06m) while Long grabbed silver (7.87m). The crowd in Berlin, would have been disappointed by what they saw, but Long wasn’t. The German was the first to congratulate Owens and later walked around the stadium, arm-in-arm with Owens. The duo even posed together for pictures.

It was a classy act of sportsmanship that stayed with Owens for the rest of his life.

“It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me. You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn’t be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace,” Owens had said.

Cindy Glynn
Coldwell Banker American Home
479-586-6262
agentcindyg@gmail.com

More homebuyers are searching for homes in areas “outside where they live”. During Q2 this year, 60.3% of listing views in the top 100 metros went to homes in another metro, an increase over the prior quarter and prior year.

Home flippers keep making money. Flippers who sold in June typically got 61%—or $188,448—more than their original purchase price. This was down from 69% a year earlier, though still a substantial gain.

A recent study by an online real estate database found that nearly 40% of first-time homebuyers under the age of 30 used either a cash gift from family members, or an inheritance, to help fund their down payments.

Nate Haasis, a high school quarterback from Springfield Southeast High School in Springfield, Ill., recently broke his conference’s all-time passing record. But then Haasis did something even more remarkable — he turned the record down because of his sense of honor and integrity.

In the last game of the season against Cahokia — and the last of Haasis’s high school career — he was only 30 yards short of breaking the conference passing record. The only problem was that Cahokia had a 16-point lead and the ball with less than a minute left. Unless something drastic happened, Haasis would fall short.

That’s when the coaches from the two teams made an underhanded deal without Haasis’s knowledge. Southeast would allow Cahokia to score so that Southeast could get the ball back. Cahokia would then let Haasis complete a pass to break the record.

I think Southeast Coach Neal Taylor’s heart was in the right place, and he was just trying to do something nice for his star player. But it was a poor decision, and Taylor has since resigned as the team’s coach.

The end of the game unfolded just as the coaches planned, and Haasis became the Central State Eight’s all-time leading passer. He should have been thrilled. But the more he thought about it, the more uncomfortable he felt about the way it happened.

“I felt disrespectful to the other players who had played football before me,” Haasis said in a story on abcnews.com. “I know teammates fought with me as hard as they could to get me every yard I had and it just didn’t feel right the way I got it.”

So Haasis petitioned the conference to disallow the questionable pass, thus negating his record. He wrote a letter to conference president Chuck Hoots: “Dear Mr. Hoots, in respect to my teammates, and past and present football players of the Central State Eight, it is my hope that this pass is omitted from any conference records. … I would like to preserve the integrity and sportsmanship of a great conference for future athletes.”

The conference granted Haasis’s request, and removed him from the record books. Griff Jurgens, who previously set the record during his years at Chatham Glenwood High School in the late 1990s, still holds the mark.

The record is important to Jurgens, and he’s happy that he’ll be holding it for a while longer.

“I think it’s very admirable what he did,” Jurgens said. “I appreciate him doing that. By doing that, everyone can kind of let it go a lot easier.”

Admirable, indeed. Haasis could easily have let the matter go, and few would have thought anything about it. After all, cheating is becoming more and more common in sports, as athletes are always looking for a way to get an edge. Just look at all the allegations about widespread steroid use in Major League Baseball, as well as other sports.

But Haasis would have always known the truth, and he didn’t want to settle for that. He knows what sportsmanship is about, and he did the right thing. In so doing, Haasis has earned himself more deserved recognition and admiration by turning down the record than he ever would have achieved with it. ~ by Tim Ellsworth

Cindy Glynn
Coldwell Banker American Home
479-586-6262
agentcindyg@gmail.com

Confounding all forecasts, Pending Home Sales rose in July at the fastest pace since January. The National Association of Realtors noted, “Jobs are being added and, thereby, enlarging the pool of prospective home buyers.

The S&P CoreLogic index reported a 0.7% increase in home prices in June, bringing them back to where they were a year ago. The FHFA index posted a 0.3% gain for the month, 3.0% ahead of last year.

Residential Construction Spending continued to march forward in July, 1.4% over June. It’s still a bit behind where it was a year ago, but this July’s gain was powered by spending on much-needed single-family homes.

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” ~ Mark Twain

In the late 1960s in Ruston, Louisiana, two Bulldog quarterbacks’ life paths diverged sharply. You might have heard of Terry Bradshaw, who went on to attain the top pick in the 1970 NFL Draft, a lengthy career with the Pittsburgh Steelers, four Super Bowl victories, a spot in the Hall of Fame and a second career in front of the camera.

You might not have heard of Phil Robertson, who was ahead of Bradshaw on Louisiana Tech’s depth chart but gave up football with one year of eligibility remaining because the game and any future in it interfered with his heart’s dearest passion: duck-hunting season.

“At the time, no one quite understood what exactly was my problem because I didn’t put football as the ultimate goal, being this stud hoss football player, but what they didn’t see then, they get it now,” Robertson said. “Because as it turns out, what am I talking about now?”

Robertson was referring to the duck call business he started out of his home, which became the Duck Commander regime and led some 40 years later to the creation of Duck Dynasty.

This is one of those times where a one-sentence pitch will tell you immediately whether a show is for you: “Duck Dynasty follows a backwoods millionaire family running a duck call empire on the Louisiana bayou.”

Coming out of Vivian, Louisiana’s North Caddo High School, Robertson said he fielded offers to join the football programs at LSU, Ole Miss, Baylor and Rice, but chose Louisiana Tech to remain close to home. After redshirting his freshman year, he was joined by some soon-to-be famous company on the depth chart.

“The quarterback playing ahead of me, Phil Robertson, loved hunting more than he loved football,” Bradshaw wrote in his autobiography, It’s Only a Game. “He’d come to practice directly from the woods, squirrel tails hanging out of his pockets, duck feathers on his clothes. Clearly he was a fine shot, so no one complained too much.”

He spoke fondly of Bradshaw… “Bradshaw’s a great guy,” Robertson said. “I was the one that named him the Blond Bomber, and while he was at Tech, I said ‘Son, you’ve got the want to and the drive to play in the NFL, you got a great arm,’ and I said ‘You got brains,’ and when I got to brains, Bradshaw said, ‘Are you serious about the brains?’

I said, ‘Well, you have enough sense to play in the NFL.’ As it turned out, I put it this way, he must’ve been smart enough to win four Super Bowls.”

After three letter-winning seasons and with one year of eligibility remaining, Robertson had had enough.

He says he spurned interest from the Washington Redskins and went after the ducks full time in the fall while completing his undergraduate degree.

“Bradshaw will tell the story better than I do,” Robertson said. “To put it bluntly, he was very happy that I chose ducks because he moved up a slot. I was blessed with a good arm, or Bradshaw wouldn’t have been playing second string to me.

“But you gotta remember, my heart was then and to this day — let me put it this way: Throwing a touchdown pass to a guy running down the sideline, and he runs down with the ball for six, it was fun.

However, in my case, it was much more fun to be standing down in some flooded timber with about 35 or 40 mallard ducks comin’ down on top of me in the woods. That did my heart more good than all the football in the world.”

Robertson went to work as a schoolteacher for several years after graduating from Tech, obtaining his master’s degree in education via night classes, with a concentration in English.

“I kinda liked ol’ Shakespeare and them guys, you know,” Robertson said. “I went back and got my master’s just in case. I thought, if I ever needed it, I’d have the sheepskin to show people no matter how dumb I looked, actually I was about half intelligent. I got the degree to let ’em know I wasn’t as dumb as I acted.”

And all the while, Robertson continued to hone his hunting craft. Dissatisfied with commercial duck calls, he began producing and selling his own about 40 years ago. These led to a series of duck-hunting videos that began 25 years ago, which led in turn to stints on the Outdoor Channel. Then came the call from A&E.

“Let’s face it,” said Robertson, “the bar has been set pretty low for you to get on American television these days. I think they said, ‘Why don’t we try a functional family,’ and somebody said well, that’s a novel idea.

Round here, you know, there’s no outbursts, belligerence, cursing, gettin’ drunk, dope, no, we’re all Godly people, so maybe it’s a little switch for a change. We’re not actually rednecks, but we probably could be called good ole boys.”

Indeed, we can think of a few college fans who’ll be able to relate to the Duckmen’s no-shave, no-laundry policies during the 10-week season. “We shower our bodies during the hunting season, but under no circumstances do we ever wash our clothes,” Robertson said. “We hang ’em up and let ’em air dry. We begin to look like the landscape around us, you know what I’m sayin’?

Oh, they’ll get it. Hey, life is good, life is good.” ~ Campus Insider Newspaper

Cindy Glynn
Coldwell Banker American Home
479-586-6262
agentcindyg@gmail.com

After slipping slightly in June, sales of new single family homes moved up 4.4% in July, and are now 31.5% higher than a year ago. Good news for buyers, the median sale price is down 12.1% from its peak last year.

Also down were existing home sales, off 2.2% from June to July, thanks the tight inventories. But good news here for buyers, the median price was barely ahead of a year ago.

The inventory of homes for sale is finally ticking up. Last week saw a decent weekly gain in single-family listings of almost 1%, and analysts expect inventories will keep climbing into September.

“Give them quality. That’s the best kind of advertising in the world.”-Milton S. Hershey

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when ruthless businesspeople created empires of steel, oil and railroads on the backs of a hapless rural population forced into grim factory towns, Milton S. Hershey followed a different path to success.

Unlike Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and the other cold-blooded “robber-barons” who offered their workers callous treatment and back-breaking labor for menial wages, Hershey offered his employees dignity and prosperity, inspiring bounteous love and loyalty in his workers and making himself wildly rich in the process.

Hershey began his candy-making career at age 15 when he was apprenticed to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, confectioner Joseph H. Royer. Hershey blossomed under Royer’s tutelage, acquiring many of the skills and tools he would later use to build his own empire.

In 1876, with $100 he’d borrowed from his aunt, Hershey opened his first candy shop in Philadelphia.

For six years he worked day and night to keep the business alive. Working 15 to 16 hours a day, Hershey would make caramels and taffies at night, then sell them from a pushcart to crowds at the Great Centennial Exposition, which was being held to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

But in February 1882, after a winter dogged by illness and mounting debt, Hershey sold the business and headed to Denver to join his father in the great Colorado silver rush.

Surprisingly, the riches Hershey found in Colorado came not from the ground, but from a cow. While working for a confectioner in Denver, Hershey learned that adding fresh milk to caramel greatly improved its quality and extended the candy’s shelf life – a discovery that would be crucial in later years.

Hershey left Denver for Chicago, where he started another candy shop. But failure continued to haunt him, and the venture quickly fell through.

After a similar experience in New Orleans, Hershey headed to New York City and opened yet another store. Despite his best efforts, the company continually lost money. When a group of kids stampeded his delivery wagon and made off with his entire stock, Hershey was bankrupt.

Hershey returned to Lancaster to find that his relatives had given up on him, refusing even to take him in, let alone lend him money to start another business. But Hershey would soon find salvation in the form of an old friend and employee.

Henry Lebkicher, who had briefly worked for Hershey in his Philadelphia store, not only offered Hershey a place to live, but also lent him the money he needed to bring his candy-making equipment from New York.

The pair then scraped together enough capital to start the business that would firmly establish Milton Hershey as a candy-maker, the Lancaster Caramel Co.

By 1893, in addition to the original Lancaster factory, the now incorporated Lancaster Caramel Co. had plants in Mountjoy, Pennsylvania; Chicago; and Geneva, Illinois, which together employed more than 1,300 workers. Hershey’s persistence had finally paid off. And this would prove to be just the beginning.

During a visit to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Hershey witnessed a demonstration of chocolate-rolling machinery from Germany that sparked a new determination in him. Hershey turned to a friend and said, “Caramels are a fad, but chocolate is permanent. I’m going to make chocolate.”

The next year, using the very same machinery he’d seen at the exposition, Milton started the Hershey Chocolate Co. and began producing more than 114 different types of chocolate candies, including the product that would make his name famous the world over – the milk chocolate Hershey Bar.

Previously manufactured only in Switzerland and Germany, milk chocolate was new to the United States, and the Hershey Bar became an instant phenomenon.

It was so successful that Hershey sold Lancaster Caramel Co. for $1 million and turned his attention solely to chocolate.

For several years, Hershey had been perfecting a plan for mass-producing milk chocolate. Now with the wealth generated from the sale of the caramel company, he could put that plan into action.

Inspired by the utopian “city of the future” created for the Columbian Exposition, Hershey set out to build not just a chocolate factory, but the ideal town where the work force could live, play, work and prosper.

Because of its rich supply of clean water, proximity to some of the finest dairy farms in the country, and plenty of land for expansion, Hershey chose his birthplace, Dairy Church, Pennsylvania, as the site for his dream city.

In 1903, Hershey broke ground for his new factory and set into motion the events that would turn his dream into a reality. The factory was modern in every way, with high-tech machinery that eliminated the cost and tedium of making and wrapping chocolate by hand, and made possible the mass production of high-quality milk chocolate at affordable prices.

The community Hershey built for his employees (officially renamed Hershey, Pennsylvania, in 1905) was just as impressive and modern. It featured affordable housing with sewage and electricity, paved streets (with names like Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue), schools, department stores, a trolley system, churches, a library, a hospital, a zoo, an open-air theater and even an amusement park.

Both the community and the company prospered, and by 1915, the chocolate plant alone covered 35 acres; company sales rocketed from $600,000 in 1901 to $20 million by 1921.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, Hershey refused to let the dark shadow of the Depression fall over his idyllic community. While other companies fired employees and cut back their operations, Hershey embarked on an ambitious building plan devised solely to keep his workers employed.

They constructed a new high school, a sports arena, a community building and a lavish 170-room hotel.

Legend has it that during construction of the hotel, Hershey was watching a steam shovel in operation when a foreman proudly commented that it could do the job of 40 workers. Hershey told the foreman to get rid of the shovel and hire 40 workers.

Both the company and the town survived the Depression and continued to flourish, thanks to Hershey’s singular vision and amazing inventiveness.

Hershey would put that inventiveness to use for his country during World War II, when he oversaw the development of the high-energy Field Ration D bars carried by GIs serving in the war zones.

The 4-ounce non-melting chocolate bars packed 600 calories and could support soldiers if no other food was available.

Hershey would later say that the four Army/Navy “E for Excellence” awards bestowed on the Field Ration D bars were among the proudest achievements of his life. ~ Entrepreneur Magazine

Cindy Glynn
Coldwell Banker American Home
479-586-6262
agentcindyg@gmail.com