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Founder's words etched at new H.J. Heinz facility

MARSHALL TWP, Allegheny County - When businessman Henry J. Heinz became a success in the pickle- packing business, he had a couple of adages he liked well enough to have set in glass. Since he was going to the trouble of having it done, he hired the best to do it for him.

Those Tiffany stained-glass windows bearing his thoughts-to-succeed-by remain wedged in their original spots in what had been in the Heinz Company's administration building on Pittsburgh's North Side. The building now belongs to Del Monte Foods since it bought a number of Heinz's product lines.

Replicas of the stained- glass art are coming to the new location of Heinz's research and development department in RIDC Thornhill Industrial Park. Reproductions of four stained-glass windows will hang in Marconi Building One. All of Marconi Building One and part of Building Two are the new home for the division.

The job and joy of recreating the Tiffany treasures has come into the hands of Nina Sattely of Stained Glass Corner in Warrendale.

"This fell in our laps," said Sattely who, with her business partner, Sally Hoover, are living proof of one of H.J. Heinz's favored aphorisms: "Luck may help a man over a ditch if he jumps well."

"We've been in business for a year, and when we started we bought a mailing list from a stained-glass company," said Sattely. "One of the names on the list was an engineer for Heinz."

In response to a flyer sent by Hoover and Sattely to the stained-glass enthusiast, representatives from Heinz "came the in door and said, 'Are you interested?' I thought they'd never be back," said Sattely.

"We were pleasantly surprised" when they did, Hoover said.

The Heinz representatives brought photographs to give Sattely an idea of the project. She then went to the windows to make rubbings on paper to use as a pattern. That was the easy part.

Finding stained glass to resemble the colors used decades ago was harder.

"All those companies are out of business now. I made a trip to our wholesaler in Columbus, Ohio, and spent four hours trying to duplicate the colors."

She ended up choosing a combination of Bullseye, Kokomo and Wissmach glass in about 15 different shades to complete the four windows. All the windows have borders that match, but the color schemes for each are different.

Some of the smaller pieces of cut glass are bound together in the copper-foil method, but the majority of the windows are connected with lead cames. The leafy wreath surrounding a globe of the planet has 56 pieces of green glass alone.

The quotations by Heinz are painted on the glass, as are a few of the details such as the globe map of the Earth.

The globe has a sash with a banner proclaiming "Our Field." The design was rendered many years before Heinz Ketchup, a common condiment, became uncommonly well-known worldwide.Sattely has been at work on the project since the beginning of May:"I'm working all the time on it," she said.The first window is already in the Marconi building, mounted on a light box and hung on a wall behind the reception desk.That window contains Heinz's personal motto: "To do the common thing uncommonly well brings success."Windows two and three containing the messages "Luck may help a man over ditch if he jumps well" and "Not so much what you say, but how you say it" are completed and will be mounted, as will the fourth, in frames that will hang in windows to be backlit the way they were intended.The fourth, "Our Field," is still in the re-creation process in Sattely's shop.All will be finished and hung by August.According to Robin Teets, spokesman for the Heinz company's research and development division, most of the people and equipment are already in the new space in the Marconi buildings."We hope to have all the work finished by mid-August and have a grand opening in mid-September," she said.Teets estimated between 100 and 110 people will be employed in the Marconi site."We wanted the reproduction windows to dress up the lobby," said Joe Quail, one of the Heinz employees who helped to make the project happen.The choice to hire Sattely was based on "who could do the job," Teets said."This is a dream for me," said Sattely, who credits her business partner, Hoover, with helping to make the project possible."Sally does all the business stuff and all the stuff that has to be done. I want to be back here playing," she said with a smile. "I'm really hoping we'll get an invitation to the grand opening."The four windows, ranging in size from 47-inches wide to 25-inches wide, will be the first of her art to hang in a public place. Most of her pieces are in private homes.The Marconi Buildings One and Two will be the headquarters for the research and development division and are marked as the Heinz Innovation Center. The facility includes quality and assurance departments as well as packaging and engineering sections for the U.S. retail and food service in America, said Teets.The new Heinz site will have a fully operational pilot shop, which is a small-scale production facility for condiments, such as ketchup and sauces, and frozen foods Teets said.

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