Candy Factory

Jack Asher was practically born with a vanilla cream in his mouth. Put there by a woman he knew only as "Miss Ella. " It was a treat the little boy looked forward to whenever his mom took him to visit his dad's candy factory in Germantown. Asher is still going to the candy factory. Still eating candy, too. About a half-pound a day. He also unloads trailers, makes deliveries, moves pallets, and puts in time on the conveyor belts. He even changes light bulbs and takes out the trash.

When Frank Glaser was a boy, he worked both sides of the family business. In winter, he made chocolate at the family's candy factory in the Logan section of Philadelphia. In summer, he was down the Shore - he grew up in Margate - and helped work for the family's other company, James Salt Water Taffy. One business sustained the other during slow times. The chocolate factory supplied the family's Dairy Maid Stores. The first was in Germantown, and at one time there were 11 in the region.

It's the smell that hits you first. It's not coming from the chocolate- filled glass cases or the hard-candy bins at Hoffert's candy store in Newtown Square. This sensuous odor wafts from the kitchen, where melted chocolate is everywhere: warming in copper kettles, coating one-pound buttercream Easter eggs, or spinning into plastic molds with centrifugal force to make hollow eggs. When Greg and Terri Panos, of Devon, bought Hoffert's last July, they had already outgrown their space at the old Maron's candy factory on 52d Street in West Philadelphia.

The Chocolate Works, Old City How sweet it was . . . and still is! Once the home of the Wilbur Chocolate Co. (remember Chocolate Buds?), the Chocolate Works, a historically certified complex scenically poised beside the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, is now home to apartment dwellers who enjoy the sweet life of Old City's Third Street corridor. "I really like the neighborhood. . . . It has all sorts of activities - cafes, restaurants, theaters, art galleries," said Helene Sengat, a 36-year-old physician who has lived at the Chocolate Works for three years.

Firefighters battle a blaze at a candy factory and warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia. An unidentified firefighter was treated for a minor injury at Frankford Hospital, Torresdale Division and was released. The five-alarm fire, which broke out shortly before 6 p.m. yesterday at Sorbee International Inc. on Global Road near Red Lion, destroyed the buildings, police said. The fire was under investigation.

He kept giving the mother of the two young North Philadelphia girls money so she could go to a neighborhood bar and drink. Then, the prosecutor said, Russell King, a candy factory worker, took the woman's two young children into a bedroom and raped them "on several occasions" in January 1988. King, 42, had agreed to baby-sit the girls, aged 6 and 9, but became a child molester instead, Assistant District Attorney Susan Perlis said yesterday. "He raped each girl, then beat both of them with an electrical cord and a broomstick," Perlis said after a Common Pleas jury convicted King of two rape charges and corrupting the morals of minors.

Vice President Bush canceled much of today's scheduled campaign visit to the Philadelphia area because of a conflict with a National Security Council meeting called over the crisis in the Persian Gulf, according to a campaign spokeswoman. Alixe Glen, the spokeswoman, said Bush had been forced to cancel visits to Media, Chester County and Norristown because of the security council meeting. Glen said the subject of the meeting was not made public. But one campaign staffer said the meeting was an update briefing on the worsening situation in the gulf, where U.S. warships attacked several Iranian navy vessels yesterday.

A fire in an abandoned North Philadelphia factory took three-and-a-half hours to get under control overnight, and fire fighters were still dousing hot spots as of 6:30 this morning. Shortly after 11 p.m., fire crews began fighting the blaze at Sixth Street and Germantown Avenue, hosing it down from outside, the fire department said this morning. Tamara Clark, 20, a student a Temple University who lives nearby, said smoke was just pouring out at first. "After about two hours, you started seeing the flames," she said.

A spectacular seven-alarm fire visible for miles last night destroyed a vacant North Philadelphia candy factory, damaged some surrounding homes and forced the temporary evacuation of about 160 residents, authorities said. Fire Commissioner Roger M. Ulshafer called the fire inside the old Wunderle Candy Manufacturing Co. suspicious, adding: "Vacant building fires don't start accidentally. " Heat from the three-story brick building, on the northeast corner of Eighth and Somerset Streets, was so intense it ignited wooden utility poles on the opposite side of Eighth.

Inside a tattered green binder labeled "Homicides 1983," police detectives have constructed a narrative of 8-year-old Eric Shunk's last trip to the store. He left his Kensington home about 8 p.m. Feb. 17, 1983, with four quarters in his pocket, which his mother had given him to buy a copybook for school. He made it to the Shop-n-Bag at C Street and Allegheny Avenue, two blocks from his house, purchased the book - he was 15 cents short but the clerk, who knew him, said he could pay the rest later - and headed for home.