Today is October 13

Celebrating birthdays today are musicians Paul Simon, Sammy Hagar, Dan Seals, and Marie Osmond.

For you sports fans out there, the following people are blowing out some birthday candles today: Jerry Jones, Nancy Kerrigan, Jerry Rice and Olympian Ian Thorpe.

You Texas history buffs surely know that it was on this date in the year 1845 that the voters of the Republic of Texas approved what would become the Constitution of the State of Texas.

Also, the construction of the White House in Washington DC was started on this date. The year was 1792.

And finally..

Our story today is about a young man named Milton Snavely. He was born in 1857.

Milton started working at the age of 9 and over the next 10 years he would work at several different business, but at the age of 19, Milton grew tired of working for someone else. He would open his own business, a candy store, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It failed six years later. It wasn’t long before Milton would try opening a similar store in Chicago and then another in New York. Both of those locations failed as well.

At the age of 26, after 3 business failures and much traveling, Milton would opena factory near his childhood home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It seems that he was destined to produce products in a factory as opposed to selling them in a store. His factory was an unparalleled success.

Over the next 20 years, Milton would grow his business rapidly. In 1903, at the age of 46, he decided to move the company to a 1200 acre piece of land near his birthplace.

Milton believed that a company and a community should be very closely intertwined. Happy citizens, he reasoned, would make for happy employees. Because of this, he felt a very strong sense of responsibility to his employees and to the community. So he started a company town and as his company profited, he would re-invest the money into making the town bigger, better and a nicer place to live. His vision was a model town. . . a “realhome town” for the employees a town with nice homes, large grassy yards, parks, public transportation, entertainment facilities. . . all of the nice things that anyone would want in a home town. He built churches, banks, a hotel, schools, a zoo, amphitheatres, amuseum and much more. In 1936, he built a sports arena for a professional hockey team. The name of the hockey team was the "Bears", but the team name had a very peculiar spelling - “B”, apostrophe, “A”, “R”, “S”.

Of all the things that Milton Snavely built, it was the amusement park that would help to draw in millions of tourists to his town during the next century. The park was originally built as a relaxing place for his workers to go for picnics and to spend quality time with their families. The park was landscaped with graceful trees and large wooded areas that provided a shady respite for thousands of people without being crowded. In 1908 a merry-go-round was added. Over the following years, a midway was added. Rollercoasters came next. A railroad to bring visitors to the park was added. More amusement rides, more rollercoasters, more carousels, morefun!

So many additions have been added to the park over the years that it now takes up over 110 acres of land.

The factory that Milton started shares his name. The town is named after him. The hotel is named after him. The very large, popular amusement park is named after him. The professional hockey team was nicknamed “The Bears”, but with the strange spelling - “B”, apostrophe, “A”, “R”, “S”. That’sright, B - A - R - S. The unique spelling was to honor the most popular product that Milton’s factory produced. Have you figured it out yet? I bet you will when I say the full name of the hockey team. When pronounced according to the original spelling, the teams name was not the Bears, but rather the Bars.. . as in. .. The Hershey B’ars. The parks name is Hershey Park, the hotels name is The Hotel Hershey. And of course, Milton’s factory town is called Hershey, Pennsylvania.

And it was on this day in the year 1945 that America lost one of its greatest entrepreneurs when Milton Snavely Hershey passed away.

And that is just one of the things that has occurred on this day in history.