Helen Grace, 88; With Husband, Built Chocolate Empire Bearing Her Name

Helen Grace, who along with her husband built a multimillion-dollar Southern California candy empire that bears her name, has died. She was 88.

Grace died Saturday of natural causes in her Huntington Beach home.

“They were smart people. Hard-working people,” said her son, Jim, who took over the company in the 1970s and ran Helen Grace Chocolates until it was sold 1 1/2 years ago. “It’s the American Dream. They started with nothing.”

Bill and Helen Grace opened their first chocolate shop in San Pedro in 1944, on her 30th birthday. The story goes that Helen Grace was expecting a box of chocolates as a present and was surprised to be given a whole store instead.

Helen Grace worked the counter, selling candy to customers, while her husband, a shipyard worker by day, made chocolate at night.

“They did very well,” their son said. “They sold everything that he could make.”

Eventually, they opened a chain of stores and began selling candy to schools for fund-raising campaigns that would raise more than $200 million over the years.

Helen Grace was born Jan. 10, 1914, in Washington state. She moved to San Francisco, where she met Bill at a dance.

She retired from day-to-day participation in their business in 1963 and the couple eventually moved to Northern California, where they operated farms and cattle ranches.

They later developed avocado and lemon groves in Ventura County. The couple divorced in the mid-1980s.

But Grace never lost her love for the family’s candy business. Until just a few years ago, she would occasionally stop by a retail store to see how it was being run.

“She was a celebrity,” her son said. “She enjoyed that. But she was always very gracious about it.”

It was all part of her lifelong love affair with chocolate.

“Our whole family loves chocolate,” Jim Grace said. “I’d go to her house and she’d have a box of chocolate on the table while she watched TV. She was always nibbling.”

Grace is survived by two sons, five grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.