'Heart of the Hoagie Shop'
Shirley Swory of Butler was 18 and Lyndon Johnson was president when she first grabbed a bread knife as an employee of the Hoagie Shop.
Today Donald Trump is president, and Swory is still manning the counter at least three days a week at the 60-year-old Butler institution at 100 Point Plaza.
“I was still in high school and it was April, and my mother who worked at the Hoagie Shop said 'You are going to work with me' and I said 'Oh, no I'm not.' Little did I know that I would still be here 50 years later when I was 68.” she said.
Swory said she has been making and serving hoagies nearly uninterrupted “give or take two deaths in my family (her mother, Elizabeth McLane, and her first husband, Jack Swory) and I took time off to have three children.”
“I've always worked at the Point location,” she added, at both the original site on New Castle Road and the Hoagie Shop's present location across the road in the former Rita's Italian Ice store.
“I never worked in the one (Hoagie Shop location) in Bon Aire,” she said. “I'm not fast enough for them up there.”
Still, her speed kept her on long enough for hoagie-making to become a family tradition passed down from her mother and from Swory to her own daughter, Paula, who worked at the business “for a little while.”
Items have been added to items to the menu, she said, but the original regular, steak, hot sausage, fish, tuna and meatball hoagies remain.
Swory said, “When I first started here, Castle Rubber was still in business. We used to make up hoagies ahead of time for the regulars so they could grab them to go and run out again.”
Swory said, “I used to be called the brat back then. In the 1970s, we used to sell doughnuts and I always had to grab one or two.”
“I used to work a lot of double shifts, 16 hours, back in the '80s when someone would call off work,” she said, adding the three days a week she works now are plenty.
Since she lives within walking distance of the shop, she said there have been snow-filled winter days when the Hoagie Shop has been the only business open along New Castle Road.
“The whole hill was closed up except for the Hoagie Shop. We'd get one or two customers come in, and we'd go 'What the hell are you doing here?'” Swory said.Swory said it's the homemade bread that draws customers back time and again, and, she adds, her touch with the hoagie ingredients.“A lot of people ask for me to make their stuff because they like the way I make it,” she said.“I didn't realize it, but I guess I'm well liked,” she added.Despite slinging hoagies for a half century, Swory said she doesn't have a favorite menu item, probably whatever longtime co-worker Tammy Hartle of Butler assembles.Swory said, “We're allowed to eat while we are here. Tammy, she always makes something to eat and splits it with me.”Hartle, who has worked at the shop a mere 30 years, said, “Shirley is the heart of the Hoagie Shop and I ought to know considering I've been working with her over 30 years.“She's not only my best friend for life, she's family to me,” Hartle said.Hartle added Swory has become such a fixture the children of her first regulars are bringing their own children in.Asked how long she's going to man a counter, Swory said, “I've been trying to get out. Unfortunately there's bills at home. ““I thought I would be gone by now, and by gone I mean under the ground by now,” said Swory.
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