Classic Family-Run Neighborhood Bakeries Face Bittersweet Future

HOMEWOOD, IL — The owner of Pearson’s Southgate Bakery is a master craftsman whose medium is sugar and shortening. So, good luck slicing into one of Paul Drzymalla’s almond crescent rolls and saving half for tomorrow.

Nearly all his customers are regulars who shop like it’s 1965, returning week after week to bring home a box of hand-dipped cookies, a pecan coffee cake or apricot sweet rolls.

“Why do we come here?” Ruben Jaime said, his eyebrows shooting up as he surveyed the pastry-filled glass cases. “Have you tasted the food? It’s so fresh, it bends around your hand when you bite into it. It goes right to your toes. It’s like a second honeymoon!”

Jaime had been happily absorbed in picking out a half-dozen sweet rolls with his wife, Sandra Jaime, on their weekly Saturday morning stop. “This is real food,” she said. “If anyone is counting calories, these are worth it.”

Everyone who walks in gets a friendly greeting from Drzymalla, as he knows many of their names. Customers walk out smiling, carrying white paper bags or cardboard boxes tagged with a Pearson’s Southgate Bakery sticker. The scent of freshly baked goods follows them out the door in a puff.

Drzymalla turned 81 on a Tuesday in July. He headed to the store in Homewood, Illinois, at 3 a.m., and spent the morning baking the bread, sweet rolls and coffee cakes he would sell that day. He’s been at it for more than 50 years. Despite health problems, changing tastes and declining business, he has no plans to quit.

“I’m a stubborn German,” he laughs, his blue eyes bright beneath an old ball cap dusted with flour.

Drzymalla’s most devoted fans would never think of buying treats where they buy their toilet paper. Ask and they’ll tell you that they can’t be won over by the aroma of fresh bread or the sight of neon-frosted cakes at their local warehouse-sized grocery store, a significant source of the independent bakery's competition. But the day may come when they have little choice. Pearson's Southgate Bakery at 18670 S. Dixie Highway is missing a key ingredient other small bakers have — family members willing to take over the business.

Drzymalla, born in Germany in 1938, learned the art of baking in a trade school. He immigrated to Canada at 18, then to the U.S. at 20, where he joined the army. When he got out, “a guy in Chicago Heights owed me money, so I went there,” he said of the south suburb, a former industrial hub that is now struggling. A priest at St. Agnes Catholic Church got him a job across the street at Pearson’s Bakery, which opened in 1946. After the owner was killed in a car accident, his wife — Mrs. Pearson — took over, and shortly afterward Drzymalla bought the business from her.

“I had 24 people working for me, including seven bakers,” he said. Besides the traditional treats, they provided all the bread and dinner rolls for local country clubs and restaurants, made wedding cakes including one that fed 800 guests, even created cheesecakes for Swiss Colony, the popular food mail-order company, in Wisconsin. The business also included a storefront four miles north in Homewood in the tiny bustling Southgate strip mall. “I paid $70,000 in union dues every year,” Drzymalla said.

His family took notice of the hard work. “I have a daughter who works in nuclear medicine, a son who works for the railroad on 12-hour shifts, and another daughter who worked with me on Saturdays, but she has a job with Easter Seals and two kids,” he said.

“They say to me, ‘Remember all the family parties where you fell asleep? You work too hard.’ This is a family business, but there’s no more family.”

Generations of bakers

The tale may be familiar to James Schorr. On June 29, he closed the doors of Schorr Family Bakery’s two locations in Pittsburgh after 45 years and decided to retire, according to the Tribune-Review. Daughter Kaitlyn Schorr told the paper he needed foot surgery that requires up to six months of recovery.

“My dad has dedicated so much of his life to this bakery. He gets up at 11:30 p.m. and he’s in here at midnight and bakes all night,” she said. “It’s a tough business.”

But other local bakers across the U.S. are luckier.

In upstate Grayling, Michigan, Loren Goodale, 80, works alongside his son, Loren Goodale III, and daughter, Linda Goodale. And in Elmont, New York, at the western edge of Long Island, 66-year-old Paul Sapienza has handed down the bakeshop he took over from his parents to his son, Andrew Sapienza.

Goodale learned how to bake from his mother, a state fair champion homemaker whose talents expanded her husband’s grocery business and eventually became a business of its own. “I learned how to bake the quality way,” he said. “I took over the summer between 10th and 11th grade, and during my senior year, I worked the midnight shift and went to school during the day.”

After a successful foray running a Sears catalog store in Grayling, Goodale decided he’d rather bake. He started out on his own; now he’s up to 12 employees. His daughter works the midnight shift, and his son comes in later to make dough and also handle the books. “I sleep in and come in at 8:30,” he jokes. “But I still work 10 to 14 hours a day. What 80-year-old does that? I know how blessed I am.”

Goodale’s Bakery will mark 48 years in business this summer. “I started this business from scratch on Aug. 9, 1971,” he said.

Will there be a party?

“We have a party here every day. I enjoy my customers. We all enjoy it.”

To keep their customers happy, Sapienza’s Bake Shop on Long Island is open 365 days a year. “Thanksgiving, Christmas, those are our busiest days. I couldn’t make up the revenue the day before if we were closed,” Paul Sapienza said.

The family business dates back to 1935. His parents married and bought a grocery store; his father began making bread to sell in the store, and as he added Italian pastries, the baking business took off, becoming a hit.

After 30 years, his parents tired of the grind and sold the shop. But the new owners soon “ran it into the ground” and the family bought it back. Paul, 20, left college and took over. “In 1973, Sapienza Bake Shop was one of nine bakeries in the area. By 2003, we were the only one left,” he said.

“In the 1960s, there were 30,000 bakeries in the country. Now there are 6,000. These bakers sent their kids to college so they could do something else. We’re very fortunate to have a second generation take over,” Sapienza said, referring to his son, who is 39.

Part of the reason business has remained strong at Sapienza Bake Shop is that it specializes in cakes and desserts. That made it an evening destination instead of a morning shop, so it didn’t feel the pinch when fast-food restaurants started offering a quick breakfast in the 1970s, one of the first challenges to mom-and-pop bakeries. And while the neighborhood demographics have changed, he said, tastes haven’t.

“We haven’t had to change our product line very much at all. There are still a lot of families that have big parties and big celebrations who order cakes, and that’s what’s gotten us through it.”

Business on the Rise

Sapienza’s was one of 923 independent bakeries operating in New York in 2018 and among 6,825 open across the U.S. There were 340 in Pennsylvania, 287 in Illinois and 216 in Michigan. Only California had more, with 1,063 bakeries. And despite changing tastes and a big shift in cooking and dining habits that find few American families sitting down together at the nightly dinner table, business is on the rise for community bakeries, according to a study commissioned in 2018 by the Retail Bakers of America (RBA).

“I think it’s because everybody needs something special once in a while, and that’s what a bakery can offer,” said Bernadette Shanahan-Haas, RBA director of operations.

“Actually, we’ve seen quite an uptick in the last five or six years. TV shows help because they give people ideas for great cakes, and then they try to find a bakery to create it. Also, people want high quality products with better ingredients and no preservatives,” she said.

As with many trends, Millennials are driving this one. That’s good news for new specialty bakeries like Sprinkles, which launched a 24-hour automated cupcake machine in front of its flagship store in Beverly Hills, California, in 2012 and has expanded to 13 locations across the country.

Millennials also are catapulting social media marketing, which has become vital for promoting local businesses like neighborhood bakeries. Goodale’s Bakery, Sapienza Bake Shop and even the Schorr Family Bakery all have Facebook pages where fans post mouth-watering photos and enthusiastic testimonials.

Pearson’s Southgate Bakery, a one-man operation, doesn't have its own website, and generates little online buzz.

In 1995, Drzymalla downsized his baking operation to one location, selling the Chicago Heights bakery and installing equipment at the Homewood storefront. For many years, he was able to keep up wholesale orders, like baking Irish Soda Bread for County Fair Supermarket in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood, an Irish-American enclave.

That’s key to keeping bakeries in the black, said RBA’s Shanahan-Haas. “You can’t rely on who’s going to walk in the door to keep you open,” she said. “A cute mom-and-pop bakery will have 20 people in back baking 40 pies in a day.”

Once a week, there are two bakers at Pearson’s Southgate Bakery. Drzymalla gets a hand from Tony Bozeg, also 80, one of his former bakers, who says he comes to help “because I like to talk to Paul.”

Three years ago, Drzymalla got sick and closed his doors for a month. Worried customers created a Facebook page to help drum up business when he reopened. Drzymalla appreciated the boost. But as a business owner who doesn’t even take credit cards, he’s uninterested in computers or technology. He keeps his recipes in ancient notebooks, their pages falling out. He relies on his own mental arithmetic when ringing up a customer’s order to make sure the register is right. And he turns over his sales receipts to his daughter, who keeps a spreadsheet of his accounts.

But it was social media that came to his rescue this summer. After his “counter girl” retired at 62 last November, Drzymalla was left running between customers and the oven as he tried to man the bakery alone. After two sympathetic customers posted the news on Facebook in June, 24-year-old Nikki Loudon turned up to help. A teacher, she will only be able to work until mid-August.

‘Still experimenting’

The storefront itself needs attention, too. Sugar and flour have made their way into every crevice. The ceiling over the oven is as brown as the crust on Drzymalla’s white bread. Holiday decorations from every season hang in the store year-round. In the corners, the tiles are chipped. Customers notice, but they don’t complain too much.

“People say, ‘Look at the floor.’ But he doesn’t bake on the floor,” said Mel Kranz, a Homewood fan who has been coming to Pearson’s for at least 20 years for food he says is “made with genuine love.”

Creating delicate pastries and cakes is a physically punishing job. Ingredients come in industrial-sized sacks and buckets. Drzymalla measures ingredients by the pound.

A June wedding cake for 150 guests was too heavy for him to lift, so he delivered it in pieces and assembled it on site. “The problem was that I’d hurt my arm,” he said, lifting his t-shirt sleeve to reveal a purple bruise covering his right shoulder.

Why does he keep baking?

Drzymalla said he “lived his life in reverse” and enjoyed spending his money as a young man. And he married at age 40 and had the first of his three children. “So I couldn’t retire at 65,” he said with a wry smile.

Sometimes there is family talk of selling Pearson’s Southgate Bakery, Drzymalla said, but it comes and goes. Instead, he thinks about tweaking his product line. “Eating habits have changed. People only want two bites now,” he observed, an idea backed by the RBA study.

“I’m thinking of making my sweet rolls smaller, half the size. Then they might buy three —one of these, two of those. I’m still experimenting.”

Or, it could be that it’s hard for the old-school pastry artist to give up his art. As the RBA’s Shanahan-Haas said, “These bakers are some of the most creative people in the world.”

Drzymalla wouldn’t say what motivates him to keep the doors open at his beloved bakery. And his most faithful regulars, well, they’re just thankful for whatever it is that inspires the 81-year old’s continued devotion to baking treats that make any day a bit sweeter.

On a recent morning, Ruben Jaime ordered up extra cherry Danish to share with coworkers and customers at a nearby car dealership.

“People at my job bite into one of these and say, ‘Oh my God, where did you get this?’” he said.

While he’s quick to tell folks about Pearson’s, Ruben Jaime knows the fabulous local bakery’s days might be numbered.

“This place is fantastic,” he says. “I hope someone keeps it going.”

If that sounds like a warning to you, here's some advice: Get there soon, order the almond crescent roll and eat the whole thing.

Patty Houlihan is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared on DailySouthtown.com and HFChronicle.com.