James O. Welch Company Profile of McKeesport Candy Co. - 1953

Published by Welch News, Volume XII, Number 1, October 1953

At the National Confectioners’ Association annual convention, held this past June at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the manufacturers listened to a very interesting discussion of the marketing of their products, by representatives of the various channels of distribution.  Sales, through wholesalers are still roughly equivalent to sales through all other channels put together.  And the representative of the wholesalers, who had been invited to present their point of view and their suggestions, was Mr. Ernest Prince. 

When Joe Balocca was president of the National Candy Wholesalers Association three years ago he did a lot of thinking about the needs of his industry and ways to improve it.  The result of this thinking, and of conference as with many other public spirited jobbers, was the birth of the Wholesale Confectionary Industry Foundation.  This organization, although having the help and cooperation of many leading manufacturers, is run entirely in by the wholesalers as a long-range effort to improve and to strengthen their function in our economy for the benefit of everybody concerned.  The chairman of the foundation, during this past year, was Mr. Ernest Prince.  Part of the speech which Mr. Prince made before the manufacturers’ convention was reprinted as an excellent article in the August issue of the National Candy Wholesaler.  It tells of the widespread test of the display and sale of ten-cent bars at the retail level, carried out by a number of leading jobbers all over the country, which was initiated and sponsored by the Wholesale Confectionery Industry Foundation. 

We think this introduction ought to justify our title for this article.  And if you will promise to shoot with only small-calibre guns, we’ll add that not only is he a Prince, but a very Ernest Prince indeed.

This earnest young man -- well, we think anybody only fifty years old is young, and we’re writing this article—was born on September 20, 1903.  His father owned a meat market in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and Ernie went through grade school and high school there.  But at the age of nineteen, after graduating from high school, he went to work.  He has been working ever since, with very little time off even for good behavior. 

Ernie’s first job was as a jewelry salesman, covering Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio.  He stuck with it one year, and then became a clothing salesman, selling men’s suits and haberdashery in a retail store.  The young man was entirely unaware, however, that this might be the road to the presidency of the United States.  So at the end of two more years, feeling that he had acquired monumental and sufficient sales experience to qualify as an expert, he took a position – not a job – in sales promotion. 

The young expert’s first assignment was to put on a sale for a small department store, in St. Albans, West Virginia, that was going out of business.  Although the sale was part of the orderly liquidation of this particular unit, the firm which owned the department store also had a chain of shoe stores.  So Ernie soon found himself managing a shoe store in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.  But at the end of a few months the boss of the outfit, having finished closing up the department store in St. Albans, took over that shoe store for himself.  And our sales and promotion expert found himself high and dry, without either a job or a position.  What he did have now, acquired only a few weeks before, was a wife.  Which did not make it any more alluring to be among the unemployed. 

In fact, a wife was the one single thing worthwhile that Ernie feels he got out of this shoe store episode.  He had been introduced to Miss Pearl Simon of Pittsburgh by a shoe salesman.  And after a whirlwind courtship for three weeks they had been married on April 20, 1926.  The question now was not whether two could live as cheaply as one.  That was purely academic until the more fundamental question was solved, as to where the living for even one was coming from, and how, and when.  It was the solving of that problem which, more or less by accident, but this temporarily penniless prince in the candy business. 

For the former Miss Pearl Simon had a sister who was married to Max Mullens, a candy jobber.  Not knowing what else to do with himself until he found a job, Ernie Prince dropped in on that business.  When a couple of the employees didn’t show up one morning, Ernie plunged in and helped out.  He was still helping out when Saturday came, and his brother-in-law-in-law handed him fifty dollars as his pay.   Ernie says that since he and his wife were then living with the Mullens, were paying no board and room, and didn’t have a quarter to their names, he certainly didn’t feel that he was entitled to fifty dollars, or any more than the fifteen or twenty dollars per week being paid fellows he was replacing.  So he refused to take any more but kept on working in the jobbing establishment and in two months was managing the place. 

One year later, in 1927, feeling that he had learned enough about the candy business to know what he was doing, Ernie went into business for himself.  Although he called his enterprise the McKeesport Candy Company from the start, he began it on a very small scale, with three thousand dollars working capital borrowed from a bank on a note endorsed by his father.  He had a small cash-and-carry store, with no salesman and not even a truck.   After the long hours the store was open Ernie went out selling himself.  Presently he bought a secondhand truck for three hundred dollars, later hired somebody to help him, gradually took on salesmen, a bookkeeper, and stock clerk, and eventually over the years established a real wholesale house. 

The McKeesport Candy Company has been a profitable and prosperous business, paying all its bills promptly and with an excellent reputation in every way, from the day it opened.  Still not one of the country’s largest wholesale tobacco and candy firms by any means, it is certainly one of the most successful – as a checkup with Dun and Bradstreet will quickly reveal.  Today the company has seven salesmen, four trucks, about twenty-five employees altogether, and services a radius of about thirty miles.  This includes a part, but not all, of Pittsburgh. 

In 1935 Ernie bought the four-story L-shaped building which his business now occupies.  The first floor and basement, really on three levels and comprising about ten thousand square feet, are used for stock and shipping.  He has two cold rooms for candy one for longer storage and one for goods used in filling current orders.  The second floor of the building is used for offices, and for a meeting room for the salesmen, all of which are air-conditioned. (We mean the offices, not the salesmen.)  The third and forth floors are rented out, but Ernie in turns rents a small warehouse across the street from his main building, for extra storage needs. 

About forty percent of the total volume of the McKeesport Candy Company is in candy and fountain supplies.  It does very little in notions, so the remaining sixty percent is practically all tobacco.  It is now on the direct list with all the cigarette and tobacco manufacturing companies.  This fact alone is just one measure of the change that has taken place since Ernest Prince opened his hole in the wall a little more than a quarter of a century ago. 

Another change is that the cash-and-carry business has disappeared.  All sales are made on a regular service basis.  But this is not due to the growth of the establishment.  Here in Pittsburgh, as elsewhere in America, the wholesale cash-and-carry business in all lines seems to have become a casualty of the traffic jams which fills our streets.  This type of operation came in with the rising usefulness of the automobile for quick pickups, and disappeared with the declining usefulness of the automobile for anything but outdoor movies. 

And one more change in the scene, which probably is connected in part with the gradual expansion of the McKeesport Candy Company, is that Ernie doesn’t have as much hair on the top of his head today as he did twenty-five years ago.  But, come to think of it, who has?

We don’t know when the McKeesport Candy Company will be blossoming out in a new home, complete with hot and cold running conveyor systems and hydramatic two-carburetor IBM bookkeeping equipment.  But the boss and his wife moved into their own personal new home, in Pittsburgh, only a few weeks ago.  And unless the printer double-crosses us a picture of it will appear somewhere on these pages. 

Ernie and Pearl have two children; Gerald Stewart Prince, born May 12, 1928, and Gloria June Prince, born June 16, 1931.  (We never hesitate to reveal a lady’s age when she is only twenty-two.)  Gerald is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Gloria of the University of Michigan.  And on June 21 of this year Gloria was married to Mr. Edward I. Baime of East Orange, New Jersey.  When we were gathering information for this article the young couple were just back from their honeymoon. 

Gerald was married in Salt Lake City, on July 4, 1951 and has a son, born March 30 of this year, named Bradley Todd Prince – the Todd being a memento of the fact that Gerald was stationed at Todd Park for a while.  Since young Bradley Todd is the only grandchild so far, it’s a good thing his parents live in the Pittsburgh area and not in Salt Lake City – Gerald is inside manager of the McKeesport Candy Company – or we might find Pearl and Ernie doing some frequent and long-distance commuting.  As it is, they can probably borrow the baby to beam over whenever they feel in the mood. 

Ernest Prince once played golf, but gave it up primarily because, he says, he wasn’t any good at it.  (If that idea should really take hold, most of the golf clubs we know anything about would look like ghost towns in a month.)  He loves pinochle, and plays a little poker and gin rummy.   He studied the violin eight or nine years when young, and once sang in a choir.  (At the NCWA banquet in Chicago in August, every single man at the head table had been a singer of more or less official standing.  Nevertheless this writer, as toastmaster, was somehow able to keep any of them from performing except Phil Gott.  He was too foxy; he got away with it by bursting into song, without any warning, right in the middle of his speech!)

But Ernie has given up the violin and singing as well as golf and similar vices.  He does belong to the McKeesport Chamber of Commerce; is a member of the National Association of Tobacco Association of Pennsylvania, and a director of the Western Pennsylvania Tobacco Association; is on the board of Congregation Beth Shalom, the largest conservative orthodox Jewish congregation in Pittsburgh;  and we have already indicated his tremendous interest in the National Candy Wholesalers Association, of which he was a charter member, and of which he has been on the board of directors  –  except for one year’s absence due to health – continuously since the second year of its existence.  And he and Mrs. Prince have done considerable traveling, especially all over the United States.  His only real hobby, however, is work – and more work – in and for his own business.  That would seem to account for the steady growth of the McKeesport Candy Company, and for the high regard in which its president is held by his associates everywhere.  

You can view the original version of this article here.

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