Thursday, September 11, 2008
By Mary Niederberger, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
For 23 years, Judy and Dan Kevlish, of Carrick, made a weekly trek to Munhall to have coffee and doughnuts and to stock up on baked goods at A&B Donuts, a bakery on East Eighth Avenue.
But in January the bakery, which was operated for 46 years by Armand Panka, closed and the Kevlishes felt lost without their weekly fix.
Mr. Panka, 69, who used his great-grandmother's Slovakian recipes for his baked goods, closed the store on New Years' Eve, deciding that he was getting too old to operate it.
"We'd ride by here to see if maybe it had opened up again," Mrs. Kevlish said. "I just didn't believe that he would really close for good."
Then last month, the Kevlishes' wishes came true. The bakery was reopened. Inside, they found all the same delicious doughnuts and familiar Slovakian baked goods, including nut rolls, cold dough cookies filled with apricot, raspberry and nuts, and Paska, a traditional Eastern European Easter bread.
Mr. Panka had found a buyer for the business right next door -- Munhall District Justice Thomas Torkowsky, who had worked for Mr. Panka when he was 19 years old.
Mr. Torkowsky, 47, worked as a baker for various bakeries for about a decade before becoming a Munhall police dispatcher and constable. He was elected district justice in 1999.
Mr. Torkowsky's partner in the newly reopened A&B Donuts is Brad Hruska, who owns a plumbing and heating business.
Mr. Torkowsky gets to work between 1 and 3 a.m. every day the bakery is open -- Tuesdays through Sundays -- and bakes until it is time to go to work in his courtroom next door. He takes off his baker's whites, showers, then puts on his black judicial robe.
Mr. Hruska keeps all of the equipment in the kitchen operating and works at the counter during busy times. He's hoping to learn to bake as well.
Mr. Panka puts time in at the shop as "a supervisor." He was there on a recent Friday morning to tell Mr. Torkowsky he wasn't happy with the quality of some of the store's baked goods that he spotted on sale at a local gas station.
"I didn't like what I saw and I had to come in and tell him about it," Mr. Panka said.
As part of the sale of the bakery, Mr. Torkowsky and Mr. Hruska acquired the white binder that holds plastic-encased note cards bearing handwritten recipes for baked goods sold in the store. The plastic pages are smeared with dough and flour.
The new owners also got the decks of 12 commercial ovens that can bake 24 pans of pastries at one time.
The shop is now located across the street from the Homestead Post Office. But when it opened in 1963, it was across the street from the main gate to the U.S. Steel Homestead Works.
"The guys that were going into the mill, they made me," Mr. Panka said. "They ended up going home and telling their wives about me. We ended up with large crowds in here. I used to have three girls working in here in the mornings when the mills were really bustling."
As a young man, Mr. Panka learned the bricklaying trade, but decided instead to go into business for himself. He opened his shop initially as a doughnut shop. That was a success, "but it didn't seem to be enough."
His mother, Margaret, pulled out some of his great-grandmother's recipes and suggested that they start to offer some of those baked goods at the shop as well.
"We got the nut roll recipe and the cold dough cookies and the Paska and they became a very big hit," Mr. Panka said.
During Christmas and Easter seasons, patrons would line up on the sidewalk outside of the store and Mr. Panka would be so busy baking he would sleep in an apartment he kept in the shop building.
At one point, A&B Donuts had outlets in Duquesne and Homestead.
But the business hit a lean stretch in the years after the mill closed. Mr. Panka said he knew that however tough it was for him and his wife, also named Margaret, it was tougher for the laid-off steelworkers and their families.
"It was a struggle for us and other people in business. But it was a great struggle for the people who worked in the mill who had to get used to making $5-$6 an hour," he said. "There were suicides and divorces."
Things picked up again for the shop when the Waterfront shopping complex went in at the site of the former mill and a supermarket and drug store were built across the street.
"The people who were curious enough to see what the Waterfront was made of rode past here and stopped in," Mr. Panka said.
In recent years, he said, his customers have been a mixture of local Mon Valley folks and those passing though the area on their way to work or to shop.
Sundays, when the shop is open from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m., remain one of the busiest days, he said.
Mr. Panka's decision to close the shop at the end of the year was based solely on the fact that he was feeling physically unable to keep up with the demands of running the business. He had one knee replaced in 2007 and was facing another replacement in January.
He hung a sign on the shop in November letting customers know that his last day in business would be Dec. 31. Lines were out of the door that day.
"I couldn't believe how much we sold that day," he said.
Similar crowds appeared Aug. 5, the day the shop reopened.
"People were thrilled about it. They all wanted to know if it was the same recipes," Mr. Torkowsky said.
Business has been booming since the quiet reopening and Mr. Torkowsky said he is thinking about planning a grand reopening ceremony sometime in the near future. But for right now, he's busy keeping up with the demands of his two jobs.
"I was trying to see if they could cut a hole in the wall between the two buildings," he joked.
