HAMILTON — Patrons of the Fitton Center for Creative Arts’ Celebrating Self luncheon series Wednesday were treated to a biography of chocolatier and Hamilton native Esther Price.
“Esther Price is arguably the most famous person born in Hamilton,” said Jim Revelos, quality manager for the Dayton-based company, because her name goes out on nearly a million boxes of candy a year.
She was born Esther Rohman in 1904. Her father, John, was a Hamilton native and the family lived on Dover Street. When Price was young, her father got a job at NCR in Dayton and the family relocated.
Revelos said that Price loved working behind the candy counter at her grandparent’s grocery store in the Cincinnati neighborhood Hartwell, but that it was a high school home economics class that sparked her interest in making candy when the lesson was making fudge.
“She enjoyed sharing fudge with her friends and neighbors,” Revelos said. “When her mother complained about the expense of making so much fudge, she would perfume the kitchen to hide the aroma.”
Price dropped out of high school to help support her family by working at Dayton-area department stores, Revelos said. When a manager at Rike’s tasted her fudge, he wanted to start selling it in the store, so that became her first retail outlet.
In 1926, she started her family — twin girls and a boy — and continued to make candy for both direct sales to her own customers and to area department stores.
When one of her regular customers, a doctor, requested that she wrap the fudge in chocolate, she learned how to do that “and she could barely keep up with demand,” Revelos said, so she borrowed money to start a home business.
By 1956, she bought a larger home at 1709 Wayne Ave. in Dayton, which is still the location of the Esther Price Candies, and in 1976 she retired and sold the company to a consortium of Cincinnati businessmen.
The company is now the sixth largest chocolate company in the country, Revelos said, and has 87 store locations in five states, including four in Dayton.
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.