I Grew Up In San Francisco

California Memories   · onestSodpr3gii9ncuh0uh84c6mM17a67a1:1tu9P162 8cea7  192J2 m6  ·

The History of the Annabelle Candy Company -

Susan Gamson Karl, the CEO of Annabelle Candy Co., is the granddaughter of founder Sam Altshuler and she has provided the history of her wonderful Bay Area company exclusively for our "Lost San Francisco" page....

In 1917, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, future Annabelle Candy Company founder Sam Altshuler and a cousin decided to flee to China, escaping by train in borrowed Army uniforms to avoid being conscripted into the service.

The two arrived in Harbin, China, where they took a ship to Japan and then to the U.S., docking in Seattle. From Seattle, 19-year-old Sam took another boat to San Francisco, where he was offered a job in a candy store on Mission Street, beginning his 54-year career in candy.

Sam quickly picked up the trade and began his own small candy company, making confections in his kitchen.

During the late 1920s, Sam sold his candy in front of movie theaters, which didn’t have in-house concessions at the time. He soon developed a following for his product and eventually opened a small sales stand in the Crystal Palace Market.

As his business continued to boom, Sam began to move his family from Russia to the U.S. However, when the Great Depression hit in 1929, Sam was forced to close his shop and focus on manufacturing instead of retailing, making candy out of a small factory on a shoestring budget. He carried on in this manner throughout the depression, selling his candy wherever he could while saving money to open a larger, more modern candy factory.

In 1932, in San Francisco, he married Sylvia, and two years later they had a daughter, Annabelle. Unfortunately, the start of World War II (1941) brought with it sugar rationing, forcing the small factory to close, so Sam took a job at a shipyard in Sausalito, CA. There he conducted a time and motion study that the U.S. Navy used to streamline its ship manufacturing process. The Navy awarded Sam with a commendation for his contribution to the war effort.

He also worked for a local candy company during the war as a salesman to wholesalers in California’s Central Valley. When the war ended, Sam opened a new candy factory and took on a partner to ensure sufficient capital for future expansion.

In 1950, he bought his partner out and formed a new corporation, naming it the Annabelle Candy Co., after his daughter. After years of experimenting, the first successful candy from Annabelle was the Rocky Road bar, which Sam named because of the way the top of the bar looked.

In 1965, Sam moved the business across San Francisco Bay to its present location in Hayward, California and through the 1970’s Annabelle purchased the Golden Nugget Candy Company, which had a factory at the corner of Market Street and Duboce for many years, adding the Big Hunk and Look candy bars along with the Cardinet Candy Company, makers of U-No and Abba-Zaba bars to the company’s lineup. All candy bars are now made in Hayward today.

Sam passed away in 1971 leaving behind a candy legacy and big shoes to fill. Not that he had big feet. Annabelle ran the company as did her son Gary until 1997.

In 1997 Susan Gamson Karl, Annabelle’s daughter became President and CEO, managing the day-to-day operations. In 2011, Sam Altshuler was entered into the U.S. Candy Hall of Fame. In that same year, the company was named as the most outstanding female owned business in the San Francisco-East Bay Region.

The photo shows the Golden Nugget Candy Company on Market Street, San Francisco in the circa 1964. Source: S.F. Public Library

Candace Owens News ✅  ·

Mychal Clairmont  · oeStdonspr00hgghu0198hhf69m863u55148gigicg4fhf771hhufu8c9g  ·

When I learned that we pay for #Israeli #Healthcare and all of their #academics and their #military thats when #Israel & all the #Zionist families like the #rothschildfamily - #FalicFamily - #AdelsonFamily - #Kushnerfamily that control the world through debt, blackmail and terror became my enemy.

They've poisoned our food, destroyed our women's bodies and drained the will to fight out our men.

This is not something that just happened this is a plan that's centuries old. Before #thepanicof1819 before they sank #thetitanic and killed everyone against the founding of the #CentralBank

They poisoned us trying to destroy our future. #idiocracy go watch that movie. That's what they want from us.

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We figured the billionaire bunkers would fail, but get this…

It’s happening early.

I’ve been following bunker stories ever since Douglas Rushkoff wrote about them. Soon after, someone sent me a 2017 article from The New Yorker that revealed the secret bunker culture of bankers and hedge fund managers. They really do get together over tapas and brag about their doomsday plans.

And then there’s the story of C. Wesley Morgan, a Kentucky bourbon baron who advertised the bunker under his mansion on Zillow. It attracted the attention of an ex-military dude who invaded his home. Morgan’s daughter died in the gunfight that ensued. The bunker is now an Airbnb.

Maybe you’ve heard of Vivos xPoint. It’s an old bunker site in South Dakota where the military used to store bombs. It’s home to hundreds of bunkers. About ten years ago, a real estate grifter named Robert Vicino bought the place and started advertising it as the safest haven on earth, somewhere the super rich could bug out during an extinction event, like nuclear war or a global famine.

Things haven’t gone so well.

It’s been getting some attention lately. According to recent news, a bunch of bunker bros have filed a class action lawsuit against Vicino. Why? Well, he promised them a doomsday utopia with a medical facility, a laundromat, a general store, a security force, even a gym. He didn’t build any of it. Instead, he took their money and required them to “improve” the bunkers by installing their own plumbing and utilities. Then he used predatory lease contracts to evict them.

He kept the upgraded bunkers.

And leased them again.

(Lol…)

The tragi-comedy of Vivos xPoint recently graced the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Canadian Prepper also did a beautiful takedown. When you put a $55,000 down payment on a bunker at xPoint, here’s what you get.

Have a good laugh:

There’s not much going on at xPoint. No guilds. No orchards. No farms or gardens. No ranch. There’s not much in terms of lakes, rivers, or streams. It’s really just a bunch of bunkers out in the middle of nowhere. Look at the history, and you learn that the military built them for an entirely different purpose than survival. The high altitude and low humidity of South Dakota maximized the shelf life of bombs. They put the bomb depots in the middle of nowhere so they wouldn’t kill anyone if they accidentally exploded. The bunkers were designed to keep explosions on the inside, so they didn’t damage other depots.

The bunkers themselves don’t come with the modern infrastructure and air filtration systems to protect anyone from radiation. That would fall under the “improvements” that residents have to add themselves.

About the community:

According to the reports, residents have been getting into a lot of fights and feuds. They’ve been litigating each other. They’ve been harassing and threatening each other over things like failing septic systems. They’ve been pulling guns on each other. In one incident, a bunker bro even shot a contractor during a prolonged confrontation with the site management.

It’s exactly what you’d expect to happen when you put a bunch of entitled jerks together in a remote location. They don’t know how to cooperate. They got where they are by exploiting everyone and everything around them. Of course, they weren’t going to make it out there. They never were.

The same goes for the rest of them.

By now, we’ve all heard about the bunkers. Stories have saturated the internet. The mainstream media can’t stop talking about them. Some of them are carved into mountainsides. Some are built into old missile silos. Some have actual drawbridges and lakes of fire built around them. Celebrities all have them now. So do all the tech billionaires and their friends.

None of them will make it. Many of us predicted these bunkers would fail at some point during the collapse of civilization. It’s just a bad idea to put a bunch of rich people together in a remote location on the premise that they’ll build a community. That’s not how they accumulated their wealth. They built their wealth by extracting it from us, and then flattering themselves.

What’s interesting is that they’re already failing.

It’s ahead of schedule.

Places like xPoint have already collapsed. The doomsday events they fantasized about haven’t even started happening yet, and they’re already pulling out their guns and trying to kill each other. Another bunker project failed a couple of years ago. Maybe you remember a piece in The Lever about Barrett Moore, a doomsday tycoon who tried to build a bunker community, conning hundreds of thousands of dollars out of rich people. He wound up drowning in lawsuits.

Bradley Garrett wrote an entire book on bunker culture called Bunker. He spent months touring all the bug outs and came to the conclusion they wouldn’t last six months inside these things. They were already joking about making dungeons and chaining up teenage girls in them.

Some of them were even fantasizing about going Rambo on nearby neighborhoods and putting everyone’s heads on pikes.

Sounds lovely.

There’s a definitive lesson here: Don’t envy the billionaires and their bunkers. Don’t envy their security teams. Don’t go around believing they know something the rest of us don’t. They know nothing that climate scientists and activists haven’t been screaming for decades. That’s all they know. And they know because they’re the ones who’ve been committing all the destruction.

It’s all liability dressed up as privileged. In almost every case, you’re better off where you are. You’re better off doing what you’re doing. It’s sad that the groups with the power and resources to undo some of this damage are, instead, choosing to build bunkers and weep into the arms of Davos prostitutes about how screwed we are. They’re not going to change.

So, there you have it, rather conclusive evidence that bunkers aren’t going to help anyone. Not only were they a terrible waste of resources in the first place, they’re already failing. They were always going to fail.

It’s just happening early.

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BREAKING: HOT DAMN! Progressive star Jennifer Welch unloads the most brutal takedown of Republican Senator Susan Collins that we've ever heard, says "women are dead all over the country" because of her.

It's time that we stopped beating around the bush with these fascists...

"I think about Susan Collins and Graham Platner. And I think about the biggest resistance to Graham Platner is not what we just saw with Ted Cruz," said Welch. "I hear it the most from people within the Democratic Party. And Susan Collins is diabolical!"

"Women are dead all over the country because Susan Collins was the deciding vote for Brett Kavanaugh," she continued. "And in my home state of Oklahoma, women are dying. Women are dying in Georgia."

"If you look at the ProPublica reporting, women are dying in Texas. And Susan Collins has blood on her hands," she added. "She has a track record that makes Graham Platner's Reddit posts and tattoo look like a Boy Scout."

Welch is right that much of the opposition to Platner, the Democratic nominee, has come from within our own party. Corporate Democrats are terrified of his populist messaging on healthcare and taxing the rich. At the same time, pro-Israel fanatics despise him because he dares to condemn the genocide in Gaza. The Democratic base is aligned with Platner's worldview, but the ossified old guard is putting up a fight.

"Susan Collins is a part of the MAGA death cult where every single policy they vote for leads to death while lying to everybody and telling you they're pro-life," Welch continued. "And so the patronizing nature from the Democratic Party to treat the voters of Maine as though they cannot deduce from their decades of experience of being a Mainer that Susan Collins is a pathological, diabolical liar and that Graham Platner is willing to say, look, I was fucked up. I had an online record. I got this fucked up tattoo, but here's where I am now. We have to believe these people."

This point is well-observed. Collins is part of the MAGA cult even if she desperately wants voters to believe that she's some moderate voice. Time and again, when it actually matters, she votes in favor of Trump's agenda. It doesn't matter what she claims to believe, what matters is her voting record. And her voting record is abysmal.

"And it just infuriates me when the establishment treats voters in a patronizing way because they can't have it both ways," Welch added. "You can't say, oh, MAGA is a cult. They do whatever Fox News and Trump tells them to do. And then the Maine voters are using critical thinking. And then they're like, no, we fall in line."

Do you support Graham Platner?

Are you ready for a change in the Democratic establishment?

Please like and share if you'd vote for Graham!

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BREAKING: Trump's “you are all that matters to me” aide spends Sunday by his side as questions about their relationship keep growing!

Most White House staffers get a break on Sunday. But starry-eyed Natalie Harp appears to get more of Donald Trump.

The president's famously devoted aide was spotted accompanying Trump throughout the weekend, including at his Virginia golf club and during an excursion to inspect renovations near the White House, adding yet another chapter to one of the strangest relationships in Trump's inner circle.

Full disclosure, she wasn’t the only staffer present. But coming on the heels of multiple reports detailing Harp's extraordinary devotion to the 80-year-old president, the photos of a beaming Harp got the blogosphere humming. One wag even used the “m-word.”

Among the revelations were reports that Harp left personal notes for Trump containing messages such as "You are all that matters to me" and "What would I be without you?" One message was so over the top that future White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles reportedly found herself wondering, "Where am I?"

Trump biographer Michael Wolff has claimed the Secret Service viewed Harp's fixation on the president as serious enough to raise alarms, while Harp's own brother described the relationship as "very unhealthy.”

Harp has become famous for following the president nearly everywhere, feeding him favorable news coverage, carrying a portable printer and ensuring a steady stream of praise remains close at hand.

The White House insists Harp is simply a loyal and hardworking aide.

Whatever the case may be, the two seem pretty inseparable. Their Sunday afternoon outing together only adds fuel to the fire.

As Tucker Carlson might say, we’re just asking questions.

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 Kalen Dion

Everybody’s talking about how our president got fucked in Iran. How we spent all of this money. How we lost military installations across the Middle East. How they reopened a strait that was already open. How the nuclear deal they ended up with was worse than the one that already existed.

On the surface… it looks like the administration got completely shafted.

Unless…

This is exactly what they wanted.

Do any of you remember what was happening in Iran before we got involved in this military conflict?

They were in the middle of a revolution. Led by women. Their currency had crashed. Their leader was reportedly dying of cancer. Nearly 80% of the population wanted the government overthrown. By almost every metric, the Islamic Republic of Iran looked like it was on its way out.

Now the revolution is over. Their government is more secure than it was. Their currency is stronger. The sanctions against them are weaker. And many of the military installations in the region that could keep them in check are gone.

If you look at America’s military actions in the Middle East and Central America over the last hundred years, you’ll see a pattern. We overthrow democracies and install dictators. A dictator is easier to control than an entire parliament.

So maybe the president really did get the shaft.

Or maybe this is exactly what he wanted.

One thing is certain…

The people of the United States and the people of Iran both got completely fucked over.

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