Weavers celebrate 40-year career at The Candy & Nut Shoppe

ASHLAND – For nearly four decades, Ray and Anita Weaver have delighted Ashlanders with cashew turtles, almond toffee, hand-dipped chocolate creams and freshly roasted nuts.

Anyone who has walked in the door of The Candy and Nut Shoppe will recognize Anita’s smiling face behind the counter and the smell of Ray’s chocolate wafting from the kitchen. There’s no place quite like it. 

As much joy as the shop brings to its customers, it has brought even more to the Weavers, who have found themselves and their products at the center of local residents’ happy memories and holiday traditions. 

“It’s been a great run. It’s been fun,” said Ray, who is hanging up his apron after almost 40 years Dec. 31. “If I had a chance to do it all over again, would I do it? Yes. I’d do it again. On the last day, it’ll be tough to leave.”

Retirement Open House

The Weavers invite friends, family and customers to join them for an open house Dec. 28, Dec. 29 and Dec. 31 in celebration of their retirement.

Open house hours are 9 a.m to 5 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday. 

The thought of leaving the shop brings tears to Anita’s eyes. Most of all, she will miss the customers, who she insists are the greatest on earth. 

“I love the people and just helping everybody,” she said. “Everyone is so kind, and everybody is happy when they come in.”

Though saying goodbye is bittersweet, the Weavers will cherish the memories they’ve made at 39 E. Main St., and they’re happy to know the shop will stay open as they hand the business off to new owner Ashley Kline.

Ray bought the shop in 1979, and Anita joined him there when the couple got married in 1982. 

Business was nowhere near as strong as it is today when Ray took ownership, but the shop was already a downtown Ashland fixture, Ray recalls. 

From soda fountain to candy shop

The Hainer family started the business in 1934 as an ice cream shop and soda fountain. Just six months later, the original owners moved to Columbus and sold the shop to Don and Maxine Picking.

The store stayed in the Picking family for decades, being run by Marshall and Ruby Picking from 1945– when Marshall came back from World War II– through 1979.

In the early days, the soda fountain was a happening place for high school students to come after school, after a game or after a trip to one of the nearby theaters. Downtown Ashland was such a hot spot on Saturday nights that people would park their cars earlier in the day and then come back later, the Weavers said, recalling what the Pickings told them. 

In 1965, the Pickings moved the shop a few doors down from its original location at 46 E. Main Street to its current location at 39 E. Main St., mostly because the new building was air conditioned.

Ice cream sodas had been dwindling in popularity since soft serve ice cream shops like Dairy Queen came to town, so at the same time the Pickings moved the store, they got rid of the soda fountain and focused on roasted nuts and hand-dipped chocolates. 

When Ray Weaver heard the Pickings were ready to sell, he was working at Wooster Brush Company. He jumped at the opportunity to own his own business. 

“It was nothing about the candy. I wanted to own my own business, and this was an opportunity,” Ray said. “As far as making candy, I was clueless.”

Weaver recalls he had just three weeks to learn from Marshall Picking, who made him change the name of the store from Picking’s Nut and Candy Shoppe to The Candy & Nut Shoppe. 

“He made all the candy for us to get us started, and one day he asked, ‘Who’s going to be your dipper?’ And I thought, ‘I don’t know. I guess I’ve got to learn this,'” Ray said. 

Ray quickly learned he couldn’t work with chocolate the way Picking had, so he ended up buying a machine to melt and temper the chocolate. One tradition Ray did continue was hand-dipping. 

Teaching himself to dip chocolates by hand wasn’t easy. The hardest parts were learning to put tiny marks on each piece to signify what was inside and learning to create nut clusters in the proper shapes and sizes.

Ray will never forget his first customer on his first day in the shop. 

“She took a bite and she said, ‘Hmm, This doesn’t taste like the Pickings’,” Ray said.

“There were times I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ But I was determined I was going to make it one way or another. I stuck it out, and it got easier every year.”

Before long, people began to tell the Weavers their candy and nuts were the best they ever had. Ray attributes that to his insistence on quality ingredients and his use of coconut oil rather than peanut oil to roast the nuts. 

Forty years of memories

Some of the Weavers’ fondest memories in the shop were celebrity visits. Dean Chance, a professional baseball player from Wooster, was a regular in the shop. He would bring his famous athlete friends, like Denny McClain, Bo Belinsky and Lou Groza. 

Motown singers Annette and Rosalind of The Vandellas also visited the store, and a box of the Weavers’ chocolates was sent to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Another of the Weavers’ favorite memories is what came to be known in the family as “The Year of the Dinosaur.”

It was the late 1980s, and the Weavers had learned local students were learning about dinosaurs at school. So the couple obtained a few dinosaur-shaped chocolate molds just in time for Easter. 

“They started selling and selling, and we sold so many we ran out of chocolate on the Saturday before Easter,” Ray said. “We started taking bunnies off the shelf and re-melting them into dinosaurs.”

The next year, the Weavers prepared by making a lot of dinosaurs again, but they just didn’t sell. It was a one-year phenomenon.

Around that same time, the Weavers had a vision to expand their Christmas season business. 

When Ray took over the shop, Valentine’s Day was the number one holiday for sales, followed by Easter. Christmas was a distant third. 

So in the late 80s,’ the Weavers started sending out letters to area businesses to drum up Christmas business. 

“Well it worked,” Ray said. “Now Christmas is probably close to 45 percent of our business for the year.”

Holiday orders start as early as October, and the six days leading up to Christmas are like six Valentine’s Days in a row, Ray said, adding that he put in about 110 hours per week the two weeks before Christmas this year. 

“We’ve created a monster, and now we can’t keep up,” he said. 

A season of change

The Weavers are looking forward to having more free time in retirement, especially around the holidays. Anita expects to bake cookies and decorate her house for Christmas next year for the first time in years.

“It will be nice to just enjoy the season without it being so fast-paced,” she said. 

The couple also hope to take some trips, including visits with their daughter and her family in Kansas City. 

For the shops regulars, it was bittersweet news to hear that the Weavers are retiring.

“We’ve had so many well wishes and so many kind words. It’s been really humbling and very nice,” Anita said. 

Customers were happy to learn the the store will remain open and will be run by Kline, who is an Ashlander and the granddaughter of the late Mitchell Goschinski, who founded Mitchell & Sons Moving; Fin, Feather, Fur Outfitters and Mitchell’s Orchard. 

Kline intends to keep the same recipes the Weavers have used for years. She will also dip each chocolate by hand, fulfilling one of the stipulations the Weaver’s set when they agreed to sell the business. 

The Weavers invite friends, family and customers to join them for an open house in celebration of their retirement. Open house hours are 9 a.m to 5 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday.