How history wasn’t really made.
Back in the very early 1900’s (some believe it was either 1897 or 1901 but no one is really sure), a small group of misdirected entrepreneurs were down and out on their luck. Samuel Moore (a little known corporate motivator at the time) invited Milton Hershey, Sylvester Graham, and a few other unknown inventors to the first every “Guy Bonding Weekend” in Highmeadow Pennsylvania. To help break the group of food inventors out of their rut, Sam had asked each camper to bring with them an idea they had been working on but were stuck.
Sam’s idea was to try to get the group out of their funk and back to making money so he could keep being paid to motivate them and make more money. The whole weekend was a total disaster with almost constant bickering and fighting amongst the group. The weekend ended with a massive food fight involving various diet crackers, chocolate samples and white sugary confections, and fisticuffs between Milton and Sylvester at the Saturday dinner campfire.
The fight broke up only when a group of young women hikers looking for a suitable camp site unexpectedly happen to show up. Sam was completely embarrassed and apologized to the group of young women campers. The guys quickly packed their gear and left the woods never to see or talk with each other again. The women hikers were left to clean up the mess left by the brawling food fighters.
Most of the inventors were so depressed following their “motivational” weekend they never invented anything again. Samuel Moore gave up corporate motivation as a profession and sold his business interests to his mail room clerk Dale Carnegie. Sylvester Graham found religion, was born again, and became a reverend. He preached a health food diet called the Graham Diet which didn’t work so well as it also focused on abstinence.
Milton Hershey was probably one of the more successful survivors of that fateful weekend. He ended up settling in Pennsylvania and abandoning his prior entrepreneurial pursuits, he entered politics. He did well for a while and even had a small town named after him. However he was later was indicted for soliciting kisses from students at the local all women’s college (he claimed he was trying to make ends meet selling candy, the charges were eventually dropped and the case never went to court).
It was years later when the group of civic minded women hikers would form the Girl Scouts of America and claim credit for the invention of the S’more.
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