It was moving week for Casani last week, the final boxes of saltwater taffy and creme mints, mini-peanut chews, and soft-eating licorice and shelled almonds edging toward the loading dock at Building 208 in the old Frankford Arsenal.
By the time you read this, the company will be across the Delaware for the first time since its founding (as Jonas & Casani), ensconced in the Cooper South office complex near the Cooper River in Pennsauken. (It was the open, move-in condition of the space, not any rejection of Philadelphia, that sealed the deal.)
Casani's Building 208 offices had gotten caught up in the shuffle created by a shopping center project at the arsenal; the less-historic northern corner of the old military installation was already being demolished last week, dust rising in clouds over a rubble of brick.
But Lees, who started with the company as an office boy in 1947, won't miss the outpost in the city's Northeast, just a jog from the Bridge Street exit off I-95.
No, it is Casani's long tenure on Second Street in Old City (more than a century, ending in 2001) that he sorely misses, sitting out on a folding chair, having coffee on the sidewalk next to the Fireman's Hall Museum across from the Quarry Street woodworking shop where they made candy-stirring paddles, channeling the days (before his time) when Joe Casani and Milton Hershey - who had a store nearby - were great friends, though "their friendship was kept quiet."
And why was that? Lees dropped his voice, confidingly. Hershey's Mennonite mother was appalled when the confirmed bachelor married Kitty Sweeney, a much younger Irish Catholic beauty.
Casani "was instrumental," Lees whispered, "in getting the marriage performed."
You would have thought it was yesterday.
It was 1898.
The candy mountain
