Dusk was setting in by the time they reached the old Malta-Vita plant at the corner of Verona Avenue and Wattles Lane. The company had enjoyed a brief but spectacular success some six years earlier, improving on Dr. Kellogg's Granose Flakes by sweetening them with barley-malt syrup and obtaining a patent on the new product. A pair of out-of-town promoters, men not unlike Goodloe H. Bender and Charles P. Ossining, lured Dr. Kellogg's former bakery foreman away from the Sanitarium Food Company, spent the lion's share of their capital on advertising and soon had five big traveling ovens operating day and night. (The ovens, each three stories high, worked on the Ferris-wheel principle, circulating the flakes till they were toasted to a dry, crisp, toothsome perfection.) The public was ready for them. Tired of oatmeal, sick of grits, bilious with salt pork, pone and flapjacks and crammed to the maw with Malta-Vita advertising, they saw that the new product was convenient, nutritious, scientific, physiologic, hygienic and downright simple: just open the package, pour, add milk and eat. Success came like an acclamation. The newly minted tycoons started up a second factory in Toronto; they shipped crate after crate of their crisp and uniform wheat flakes, wagonloads, freight cars jammed to the rooftops with them, and they shipped them to Mexico, France, Germany, Norway and Czecho-Slovakia. But then the original promoters sold out - handsomely - and the product deteriorated. Kellogg's man went elsewhere, seduced by an offer he couldn't refuse, and something went wrong in the processing plant. The flakes molded. Went rancid. Rotted on the shelves and in the bowl. And Grape-Nuts, Golden Manna, Norka Oats, Tryabita, Cero-Fruto, Egg-O-See and some forty others rushed in to fill the breach.
And Charles Ossining? He was just a little late.
Charlie climbed down off of the cab and walked tentatively round the ruins of the factory, stunned at the havoc a few short years could wreak. There'd been a fire, that much was evident from the street, fingers of carbon clutching at the windows, the roof collapsed in a scatter of blackened timbers. In falling, one of the beams had torn a V-shaped gap in the rear wall, and you looked out past the brick and into the wintery snarl of trees beyond. It was no habitation, but people had sheltered here over the course of the fading months and years - vagrants, itinerant workers, factory hands short of housing during the boom years of '02 and '03 - and they'd left the detritus of their lives behind. And beneath it all, a fine glittering carpet of broken glass.
The waste of it, that's what got to him. It was like that poem he'd had to recite in school about the stone head buried in sand. That's what this place was like - a stone head buried in sand. There was no hope for it. None. Charlie felt his stomach drop.
-- "The Road To Wellville", T. Coraghessan Boyle
And Charles Ossining? He was just a little late.
Charlie climbed down off of the cab and walked tentatively round the ruins of the factory, stunned at the havoc a few short years could wreak. There'd been a fire, that much was evident from the street, fingers of carbon clutching at the windows, the roof collapsed in a scatter of blackened timbers. In falling, one of the beams had torn a V-shaped gap in the rear wall, and you looked out past the brick and into the wintery snarl of trees beyond. It was no habitation, but people had sheltered here over the course of the fading months and years - vagrants, itinerant workers, factory hands short of housing during the boom years of '02 and '03 - and they'd left the detritus of their lives behind. And beneath it all, a fine glittering carpet of broken glass.
The waste of it, that's what got to him. It was like that poem he'd had to recite in school about the stone head buried in sand. That's what this place was like - a stone head buried in sand. There was no hope for it. None. Charlie felt his stomach drop.
-- "The Road To Wellville", T. Coraghessan Boyle
dhrti:
Nice to meet you