This was my grandfather Sam Hepps's drugstore at 406 Dixon St in Homestead PA, just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh. The store had been a saloon owned by my great-grandfather Bernhardt Hepps, like his son a pharmacist. That's my great-grandfather, also known as Barney, in the bowtie and handlebar mustache. He was a Piittsburgh Pirates season box seat holder. He died during the 1949 World Series -- 6 months before I was born. I was named for him.
The store was across Dixon Street from US Steel No. 1 -- the biggest steel mill in the world. It had been Andrew Carnegie's mill. It was long known as the Homestead Steel Works. The mill closed in 1986.
When the whistle blew at 3 pm and 12 midnight, ending the shifts, the workers, known as steelers like our football team, would flock to my grandfather's store to buy cigars and light them at a perpetual gas flame.
The right seat at the soda fountain is where I spent happy days as a child, consuming as many chocolate sodas as I could stomach, and watching the steelers light their cigars. That's where I smoked my first cigar, a Marsh Wheeling Stogie, at at age 12.
Here is an advertisement from the Homestead Daily Messenger of Dec 9, 1922, heralding the opening of my grandfather's drugstore. The postcard captions and newspaper ad spelled the business name as Hepp's, but my maternal grandparents were named Hepps. They were from Hungary.
Marsh Big Havana Cigars, from Mifflin M. Marsh's cigar factory in Wheeling WV, were sold 6 for a quarter. A box of 50 was $2.05. The factory produced 30 million cigars a year during the 1920s, with half of them sold in the Tri-State area of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.