Carvel, Thomas Andreas (14 July 1906–21 October 1990), corporation chairman, was born Thomas Andreas Carvelas in Athanossos, Greece, the son of a wine chemist. When he was four years old, his family moved to New York City. During the 1920s Carvel played drums and toured with a Dixieland band in the Catskill Mountains. He also worked as a mechanic in his older brother’s automobile garage and served as a test driver for Studebaker automobiles. In the early 1930s Carvel contracted tuberculosis and convalesced at a sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York. Following medical advice that he work outdoors in the countryside, he began selling ice cream from a truck as well as from a hand cart he pushed around neighborhoods in Hartsdale, New York. On Memorial Day in 1934 his truck developed a flat tire, and he stopped in a vacant parking lot, where he plugged his freezer unit into a nearby pottery shop and continued to sell ice cream. At this point he developed the idea of opening his own ice cream store. He soon earned enough money to buy the pottery store, and his first Carvel ice cream store opened at that site. Carvel credited his father’s background in chemistry with encouraging him to experiment with different flavors and toppings in order to offer a wide variety of choices to consumers. While Carvel conducted experiments and did mechanical work, Agnes Stewart, whom he married in 1937, often ran the store....
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Carvel, Thomas Andreas (1906-1990), corporation chairman
Yanek Mieczkowski
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Gunther, Charles Frederick (1837-1920), Chicago confectioner, politician, and antiquarian collector
Nancy Buenger
Gunther, Charles Frederick (06 March 1837–10 February 1920), Chicago confectioner, politician, and antiquarian collector, was born Carl Friedrich Guenther in Wildberg, Wurttemberg, Germany, the son of Marie and Johann Martin Guenther, a candle and soap maker. The family immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1842, and at age ten Gunther began work as a government mail carrier, traveling forty miles daily by horseback. In 1850 they resettled in Peru, Illinois, an important ice harvesting center on the canal linking Chicago with the Mississippi watershed. Gunther found work as a cashier in a bank, where he came in contact with many of the merchants who shipped 100,000 tons of ice down the southern rivers during prosperous years....
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Gunther, Charles Frederick (1837-1920)
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Hershey, Milton Snavely (1857-1945), candy manufacturer
Jane M. Gilliland
Hershey, Milton Snavely (13 September 1857–13 October 1945), candy manufacturer, was born at his family’s homestead in Derry Church, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry H. Hershey and Fannie B. Snavely. In search of elusive wealth and success, Henry Hershey moved his family numerous times, always failing at his varied business ventures, including farming, cough drop manufacturing, and sales. As a result of the instability, Milton’s formal education was haphazard, and he never went beyond the fourth grade....
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Hinkle, Samuel Forry (1900-1984), manufacturer
Helen M. Rozwadowski
Hinkle, Samuel Forry (09 June 1900–19 April 1984), manufacturer, was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, the son of Samuel Wisler Hinkle, a pharmacist, and Elizabeth Forry. He graduated from Pennsylvania State College (later Pennsylvania State University) in 1922 with a B.S. in chemical engineering. He immediately took a job as chemist with the Norton Company in Chippewa, Ontario, Canada, a manufacturer of electric furnaces. In 1923 he moved to a position as chief chemist at another Canadian firm, National Abrasive Company of Niagara Falls, Ontario. One year later he returned to the United States to work for Hershey Foods Corporation in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where he spent the rest of his career. In 1935 he married Margaret Joseph in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They had two sons....
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Welch, Robert (1899-1985), political extremist, publisher, and businessman
Sharon D. Rudy
Welch, Robert (01 December 1899–06 January 1985), political extremist, publisher, and businessman, was born Robert Henry Winborne Welch, Jr., in Chowan County, North Carolina, the son of Robert H. W. Welch, a farmer, and Lina Verona James, a former schoolteacher. Welch graduated at seventeen in the top third of his class at the University of North Carolina. He dropped out of graduate school at UNC, moved from Chapel Hill to Durham, North Carolina, and in 1917 received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Unable to adjust to military life, he left Annapolis in 1919 to pursue a career as a writer. Several North Carolina newspapers carried his “Headline Jingles,” a weekly summary of the news in verse. He enrolled at Harvard Law School in the autumn of 1919 but quit in 1921 to form the Oxford Candy Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The following year he married Marian Lucile Probert, with whom he had two children....
