The Chocolate Seller on Broadway and His Kids

'From my window up there,' began the woman in an accusatory tone, 'I've been watching this poor guy sitting out here Saturday in, Saturday out, often in the cold, just dumped there. It's shameful, I tell you, shameful.' 'Mark actually likes being here, doing this,' I explained to the irate woman. 'He's doing what he can to help others.' Others far less fortunate than himself, it should have been blindingly obvious. The one and a half square metres of footpath space on Broadway, Newmarket, Auckland from which Mark Grantham sells his chocolate bars for charity has to be one of the smallest retail sites in New Zealand. One regular customer jokingly refers to it as Mark's 'office', because it is where Mark - severely disabled with cerebral palsy since birth - has plied his trade for the last seventeen years. For 20 years now, I've been Mark Grantham's chocolate admin man. For 33 years I've also doubled as his father, so I've got to know him rather well. His is quite a story - and there's much, much more to it than chocolate - taste, and you'll see what I mean.