Martha Washington Candy Stores

[Espee]

A little late for Presidents Day.
I'll bet someone here knows something about them... not mentioning any names...
I learned just a little after I found not one, not two, not three, but FOUR jokes about them in old time radio programs.
When I'm in a better net-communicating situation, tomorrow, I'll share them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Martha Washington stores were a national chain started in the 1890s, selling ice cream and chocolates, and furnished in a pseudo-colonial motif. By their peak in the twenties, there were several hundred of these stores across the country, but the Depression hit them hard, the company founder, a candy maker named Elie Sheetz, died in 1932, and most of the stores had closed by the mid-thirties. A few lingered on into the forties, but by then they were considered dowdy and old-ladyish, a relic of another time, thus the jokes.

 

[Espee]

Not having heard of the chain, I was baffled when I was first hearing references in radio comedy programs:
1930-- "Cliff and Lolly, The Nuts of Harmony"-- a Negro dialect character, played by Cliff Arquette, is asked if he knows who George Washington is. "Yeah, he's de man what's wife makes de candy."
1940-- George Burns, when asked what he'll do if Gracie becomes President, says (approximately) "I guess I can always start a candy store."
(not sure of date)-- Fred Allen show, playing off the familiar claim by old inns that "George Washington Slept Here": someone says "I think MARTHA Washington slept here-- I found two gumdrops in my bed."
Rudy Vallee show, 1935, "young west coast comic" Eddie Stanley reads a letter from home--
(approximately)
"Your little brother Skippy doesn't want to be like George Washington anymore-- he says Look how it turned out with Martha and her candy stores... and if George Washington is 'The Father of' a hundred million people in our country, how did Martha have time to make candy?"

I found some info through Google, that all the Martha Washington stores in the NYC area closed in the early 30s and the man who had operated them started over (at an advanced age) with a new line of fruit- and vegetable- based candies. I think that came from Time magazine.