The Candy Shop Easter Ads – 1972 & 1973

Easter is only a few days away. Have you bought your candy yet?

I’ve been buying Easter candy at Discount Drug Mart for weeks. “These will never make it to Easter,” I confide to the checkout cashier as she rings up my low-grade Palmer Bunny Crisps. Same thing with the Peeps Party Cake Flavored Marshmallow Chicks – they’re marshmallow history now.

Anyway, while everyone in Lorain remembers Faroh’s, over in Vermilion, The Candy Shop in the South Shore Shopping Center was the go-to candy store for many years. Here’s a vintage ad from fifty years ago. It ran in the Journal on March 28, 1972.

And here's the 1973 version announcing the store's move.

From the Journal of April 5, 1973

Click here to read my post from 2019 that tells the history of the well-remembered store.

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As I write this on Wednesday night, my iMac (that is thirteen years old – a teenager) has gone black four times without warning or explanation. I’m not sure if I will be able to continue to post while I prepare to migrate everything to a new computer, so if this is the last post that is up for a few days or weeks, you’ll know why!

The Candy Shop – Vermilion

Vintage Postcard

Easter's coming. And for many years, if you lived in Vermilion, that very likely meant you could look forward to finding some goodies from Tom and Rhonda Zahars' Candy Shop in your Easter basket.

Just as Faroh's was the choice of the locals in neighboring Lorain, the Candy Shop – located in the South Shore Shopping Center – was the hometown favorite for many Vermilionites.

Apparently chocolate had long been the Zahars’ family business through the ages. According to the DiscoverOurTown.com website, “eight generations of the family have made chocolate, for the last 34 years at the shop in Vermilion.”

The caption for the vintage postcard shown at the top of this post reads, “A popular tourist attraction creating International Award Winning Chocolates as one of our specialties. Shown here is our “Big Dipper”. Young and old alike are fascinated by this “Chocolate Waterfall” which drenches our various centers with luxurious real milk or dark chocolate.”

But chocolate wasn’t the only draw for the store.

President Ronald Reagan’s penchant for Jelly Belly created a huge demand for “the original gourmet jelly bean" in candy stores across the country. As Tom Zahars noted in an article in the April 3, 1981 Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, “The amount of Jelly Belly sold since President Reagan’s inauguration has been astounding.”

“We were lucky and anticipated their popularity but we’re still surprised at the way sales have been going. The last time we put a call in to the manufacturer, we were told there’d be a wait of 3-12 weeks for orders. We understand that they’re working around the clock, trying to keep up with the demand.”

The article also noted, "Zahars has 18 feet of shelving in the Candy Store devoted to nothing but the Jelly Belly. Most people buy the mixed variety. However there are customers who have specialized tastes.”

“I think,” said Zahars, “that the people who try Jelly Belly like them because they are a top quality, good candy. They’ll go on eating them even if the president stops. Things will probably slow down a bit as far as sales go but the Jelly Belly is definitely here to stay.”

The Candy Shop disappeared from the Lorain Phone book listings beginning with the 2005 edition.

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Here are some vintage Candy Shop ads, including a full page Easter-themed one with photos of their operations from the late 1980s, culled from various online newspaper archive sources.

June 15, 1982 Chronicle-Telegram ad

March 15, 1986 Sandusky Register ad

April 5, 1987 Chronicle-Telegram ad

December 12, 1993 Chronicle-Telegram ad