Pool Report of Obama's Stops at Wilbur Chocolate, Marvel Ranch Diner
No News, lots of chocolate.
Barack Obama marches into Wilbur Chocolate, one of a number of confectionary sweet spots in eastern Pennsylvania in search of photo ops. It's been on this site since 1930a place thick with the nostril widening smell of chocolate in all its many manifestations: Chocolate covered pretzels, giant jellies, two foot long candy bars, anise bears, Rip Van Winkle Opera fudge, chocolate marshmellows and so on and oh so sweet.
Obama pauses just inside the door to sign a couple dozen autographs, as the Mayor Russell Pettyjohn, an older gent, ambles over. He studies Mr. Obama and offers:
"You look a little naked."
Mr. Obama tilted his head. Huh?
You need a pin, the mayor explains. As said mayor wore a flag pin, this seemed a promising bit of weirdness but, alas, he offered the candidate only a lapel pin for the town of Lititz,
Then he's offered a jarful of chocolate doodads (that is, I believe, the term of art). He eats just one and offers: "Quite tasty." Eat another, the store manager offers. Our calorie counting candidate demurs. The manager furrows her brow and says: "Oh, now you don't worry about calories in a chocolate factory."
The candidate smiles, but looks skeptical.
He walks to the back of the chocolate factory to Chocolate Walk, where five plump white-haired ladies in plastic hair-nets spin chocolate into hallucinogenic shapes. So we have a white chocolate phantom of the opera mask and pink high heels fashioned of chocolate.
The candidate picks out a few chocolates for his daughters, handing them for safe keeping to Roger. Then he moves behind the counter at the factory end to talk with those five older ladies.
He watches them spin and mold and the sweet thing seems just a bit overpowering. "Can I ask you the truth, though? Do you actually eat the chocolate or do you get sick of it?'
They giggle; what a silly presidential candidate. "We make it; of course we eat it," says Jean, who had a German last name that just one of her co-workers could pronounce and none could spell.
Our culinary journey continues in downtown Reading, where Mr. Obama wanders into the Marvel Ranch diner. Now, said diner was already closed after lunch, so in truth a few extras filled the place, all of them Obamaistas.
Question to our Keystone fellow typists: What is it with the weird combinations of food? This place offered the Marvel Mess, a sandwich offering eggs, potatoes, onions, cheese, green peppers and God only knows what else.
Cheryl Burton owns the place, with her father and mother and kids, Derek 11 and Wesley, 8. She grabbed the candidate's hand but afterward whispers: “I love his ideas but I'm still undecided.”
Oh, a couple of minutes later, Cheryl offered the candidate a chocolate cake with white chocolate frosting. He looked at the thing, a little worried. "Oh man, that's too decadent for me," he said.
Then he turns around. Another woman at the restaurant offers him a plastic container. He opens it up. There's a burger, those cheese fries, and onion rings. He shrugs, takes a ring and tosses it back.
Score one for the cholesterol lovers.
There were also a couple of white middle aged women, one of whomJoanna Groebel-- contrasted him favorably with Bush "It's great to have a man who can speak in paragraphs" and another who once loved the Clintons but has had enough.
"They've moved us; they are all about power," said Tina Stanton.
And that is that. .
