Boehm's Candies

Julius Boehm was born in Vienna in 1897, and he ran the 400-meter relay for Austria at the Paris Olympics in 1924 [1]. In 1936 he was chosen to carry the Olympic torch for a kilometer over Austrian ground on its way to Berlin [1]. He reached the Pacific Northwest in 1941, and the following year he and a friend, George Tedlock, opened a candy kitchen in Seattle's Ravenna area [1]. He learned the European side of the trade from his grandfather, a pastry chef, and a candy maker named Cecil Hall helped him with the American chocolates [1]. In 1956 he moved the company to the Issaquah foothills, because the green country and mountains put him in mind of home [1]. No Alpine chalet had come before the Edelweiss Chalet in that part of the country, and a Swiss craftsman from Appenzell, Walter Schefer, gave the building its look [1]. Boehm climbed Mt. Rainier three times, and at eighty he went up the last time [1]. The chapel he had built beside the shop is a replica of a twelfth century Swiss one [1].