Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
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Source: July 1995 Volume 33 Number 3, Pages 115–119

Remembering My Grandfather and Garber's Store in Berwyn

Henry "Zeke" Pyle

Page 115

My grandfather, Henry O. Garber, was born in Mahanoy City, in Schuylkill County, on December 12th of 1862. His parents were Phineas and Elizabeth [Bensinger] Garber. The family later lived in a town called McKeesburg, which is north of Hamburg.

In 1881, not long after Reeseville had become Berwyn, he came to Berwyn for a brief time as a telegraph operator for the Pennsylvania Railroad, but then he moved back to Mahanoy City, and in 1885 married Mary Patton, the daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth [Groome] Patton. (I believe, from what I have been told, that they were of the same family as General George Patton.) She had been born in Minersville, also in Schuylkill County, and they were married in Mahanoy City.

Shortly afterwards they left for Berwyn, where my grandfather bought a store from a fellow by the name of E. A. Lobb. My grandfather added an eastern section to it, so the store had an upper and a lower level.

In Berwyn my grandfather later became a Republican county committeeman for a number of years, a school director on the Easttown School Board, and served as postmaster in Berwyn for ten years, from 1904 to 1913. (I have at home two documents signed by Theodore Roosevelt commissioning him the postmaster in Berwyn.) He was big in local politics, and in his obituary in the Daily Local News after his death he was described as being "recognized as the power behind the throne in Easttown township politics". He was also a charter member of the Berwyn Fire Company.

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He was also very interested in fox-hunting, and had a stable in back of the store, where he kept his horse.

As for the store, it was kind of a country-type general store. It was located on Lancaster avenue just west of Waterloo avenue, between what is now a bakery and Ward Burnside's plumbing business. [It is now, or was recently, an antiques shop.] I remember that it had gas lights in it.

As I said, it was a general store. It carried tobacco. It had firearms. It had baseball stuff and football stuff. It offered a laundry service that came in from West Chester. It had all kinds of magazines and comic books. It had a space on the chimney where they used to record the dates of all the events of Berwyn -- when it was the hottest, when it was the coldest, when the Berwyn baseball club won the league championship, and all that. It was all recorded on this chimney.

The store was also sort of a meeting place for the neighborhood men of Berwyn. They sat around the stove that used to be in the middle of the store and there they spun their yarns. On one side there was a big, long -- I forget what you call those things -- a big bench, where they used to sit. And they had a bunch of folding chairs. (I have one of them still at home.) It advertised Piedmont cigarettes on the back of it; the back of the chair is made of porcelain. And in the center of the store was the spittoon, on a large sheet of metal in case some of the men missed!

At the back of the eastern end was a big staircase. It led up to the parlor, which, I understand, was upstairs in a lot of houses back in those days and was where they entertained their guests. I remember that in the parlor they had horsehair-stuffed furniture, a couch and a chair. And there was an old wind-up Victrola: you put on a record and cranked the handle and opened up the doors on it so that you could hear the music. There was also one of those old record machines that played a long cylindrical tube that you put on it, with a big megaphone to one side.

(My grandfather also liked to play the mouth organ, and he also played what we called a "Jew's harp", a metal thing about four inches long that you put up to your mouth and then sort of "thumbed" a metal spring to play a tune.)

My grandfather and grandmother lived in the back of the store. There was a dining room downstairs, and a huge, big kitchen where they did their cooking and most of their eating. But when they got to talking, then they went into the dining room. And then there was the parlor upstairs. In the dining room there were pictures of fox hunts and things like that because my grandfather, as I said, was a big fox hunter.

One of the things my grandfather had in the store -- I still have it at home -- was a machine to cut off a piece of tobacco, to cut plug tobacco. It looks like a small guillotine. You put the tobacco under it and then push it down, and it would cut off a piece of tobacco for you; you didn't have to buy the whole big thing of tobacco, you could buy just a piece of it. There was also a thing on the counter that was for cigar smokers: it had a match thing stuck on it, and also a little tube that you would put your cigar into and a device would snip off the end of it.

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(You remember how years ago they used to bite off the end of a cigar before lighting it up? Well, this machine would cut off the tip of the cigar, nice and even, for you before you lit it.)

My grandfather had a little office in the upper part of the store, where he had his desk and receipts and records and stuff like that. In the desk was a little drawer where he kept any foreign coins that people would sometimes pass to him when they paid for something they had bought. After he passed away, my brother and my sister and I divided them up.

After my grandfather passed away in 1943 my mother took over running the store. She ran it for five years, during the war and first few postwar years. The things that she sold at that time were awfully hard to get as you couldn't get cigars or tobacco or things like that during the war.

After a while, in about 1947, she rented out the store, first to some people named Jester. They ran it for quite a few years, and then Dick Port came along and rented it from my mother. When he asked her if she wanted to sell it she sold it to him. (Of course, real estate wasn't very high at that time, and I think she got something like $15,000 for it.) When she rented the store out, she also moved out, back to our oriqinal house which she had never sold, on Bridge avenue. (In fact, I have lived on Bridge avenue all my life so far.) The store continued as a paper store after my mother sold it, selling newspapers and magazines and stuff like that, but it didn't have the baseball stuff and the football stuff and things like that anymore.

My grandfather was also quite a bicycle man. They used to "ride the rails" down to Atlantic City. He also did bicycle repairs. In back of the store there was an old stone house that, I was told, had been moved from the other side of the railroad, and he had his bicycle repair shop in the back end of that stone house. There was a lot of bicycle riding back then. He had a bicycle that was one I had never seen until I got ahold of it when I was a kid and found it in his shop. It had a drive shaft that ran it, instead of a chain, and had gears that ran from the pedals to the back end of the thing. It ran on gears. I had quite a time finding tires for it, but I finally found a set of them. I got it working when I was a kid and I used it for quite a while. My mother told me that it was one of the bikes my grandfather used to ride to Atlantic City.

While he carried a lot of things in the store, it was primarily a tobacco store and news agency. It had all different kinds of tobacco -- leaf tobacco, cut plug, cigars, cigarettes, all that sort of thing. The upper store had many magazines and penny candy and things like that.

In later years, while my grandfather was still running the store, a barber shop was built to the east of the store. It was run by a colored fellow by the name of Suthern. I remember a number of kids going into it because he had a whole bunch of different kinds of peanuts there: Spanish peanuts and regular peanuts and some other kinds of nuts. I used to love to go in there myself and get some of them -- even though my grandfather had all that penny candy in his store next door.

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My grandfather was also a hunter, and got quite a few deer. Whenever he went away on one of his hunting trips my mother would go down and run the store while he was away.

My father was one of his great hunting buddies. When they went hunting, they went together to a place called Camp Lamoka, just outside Monroetown. (My dad, Abram Pyle, married Henry and Mary Garber's daughter Elizabeth. When he first came to Berwyn he worked for Boyle's grocery store. He was a butcher when he came to Berwyn, and worked in the grocery store.) Anybody who got a deer would bring it in and hang it from the rafters in front of the store, and in the fall there would be several deer hanging there. And in the summer, on the two steps that came down between the upper store and the lower store, there would be a big board where you could tack up messages about things that were going on about town, sort of a community bulletin board.

My grandmother died in 1931. I can just barely remember her as I was one year old when she passed away. But I can vaguely remember her and my grandfather's sister and me playing hide-and-seek under the bed!

My grandmother was quite a lady. She practically ran the store when my grandfather was working as the postmaster in Berwyn for ten years; it was she who mainly ran the store while he was the postmaster. The post office was at the corner of Lancaster and Main avenues [where Connor's drug store is now]. That was the post office at that time. I have some pictures at home of the time when the post office was robbed. The robbers blew the safe open and the safe was all bent up. (I tried to find them the other day, but I couldn't locate them.)

My grandfather was also the manager of the Berwyn baseball team, and I do have pictures of the old ball club, and also some pictures of the old high school when my aunt graduated from there.

I also have a picture of my grandfather, standing behind the counter of the store. It shows the kinds of things he had in the store: guns in the background, the cigars and cigarettes, and boxes with the baseball stuff. He knew where everything was.

[Millie Kirkner: When I was a little girl my grandfather used to send me down to Garber's store for tobacco. I never was interested in tobacco or cigars, but I was always interested in the empty cigar boxes. Whenever Mr. Garber had empty cigar boxes he would give them to me, and they were like treasure boxes. They were wooden boxes, and came in different sizes, with different pictures on them. We would put our doll clothes in them. I had a spot up in a tree where I spent a lot of time, and I had one of them nailed up there in the tree with my treasures in it.]

We used to make little music instruments out of those empty wooden cigar boxes. We would take one and tack the lid closed.

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Then we would cut a hole in the lid, and put a little bridge on it, and put on things to hold the strings on. My grandfather also sold strings for musical instruments; he sold violin strings, guitar strings, and stuff like that. (He didn't sell other things for them, like rosin, but he did sell strings.) So I used to get these strings from him and make these little guitars out of the cigar boxes. They had a real nice tone to them, too.

[Ed Hayes: I worked for Mr. Garber for three years, selling morning newspapers when I was in high school from 1934 to 1937. He used to put out about 200 morning papers a day. I had the west end of town, and I sold anywhere between 90 and 100 papers each day. Bobby Hughes had the east end of town, and he sold about the same number. There were three morning papers then: the Inquirer, the Record, and the morning Public Ledger. I got $4.00 a week for the daily papers and an extra dollar for the Sunday paper - and that was pretty good money back then, during the Depression. At Christmas time we would get an extra dollar, and at New Year's we would get a navel orange. That was quite a treat then. "H. 0. Garber" is shown as my employer on the back of my social security card.]

I sold newspapers for my grandfather too, in 1942 and 1943, just before he died -- went all the way up to Daylesford.

Someone asked me if he sold fishing equipment. He had some fishing equipment in the store, but not a whole lot. But he did sell both hunting and fishing licenses, although he mainly had hunting and sports stuff -- hunting jackets and pants and all sorts of shotgun shells. When I was a kid I had a .22 that my dad had given me, and I used to go into the store and my grandfather would give me boxes of shells for it. So I always had ammunition for my .22. Every time he gave me them, though, he would say, "Now, Henry, I want you to be very careful with them. Make sure you have a good background before you go shooting that gun." He always lectured me on that.

My grandfather also had the first automobile in Berwyn, a Cadillac, and he was the driver when the Berwyn Fire Company got its first motorized fire truck.

After his wife died, there was a lady by the name of Lydia Caswell who was his housekeeper for many, many years. She was one of the best cooks, I always thought, around in Berwyn at that time. When I was a kid she used to make potato chips and all that kind of stuff, all the kinds of goodies that I used to like. We had a big cookstove in the kitchen at the back of the store, and that was where she would do all the cooking. I will never forget how those old-time cooks used to take a cherry pie and a lemon meringue pie and maybe a gooseberry pie and something else and stick them all in the oven at the same time and know just when to pull each one out at what time. I never could figure that out.

I was named "Henry" after my grandfather Henry Oscar Garber. A lot of people called him Harry, though. I don't know how he got that nickname, but he was known as both Henry Garber and Harry Garber. He did a good bit for me. He was my real buddy.