Edward Zacherl

Much like the restaurant he owned with his wife on Butler Road, Edward Zacherl Sr., 85, was a local fixture and familiar name to community members in Saxonburg, as well as to regular customers who traveled from as far as Pittsburgh for a Friday fish fix.

His daughters, Cynthia Zacherl and Elaine Korbeck, described their father as giving and a pillar of the community. Both noted his smile, which was the “first thing you’d see when you walked through the restaurant’s doors,” Cynthia Zacherl said.

On Monday, May 20, the retired owner of the former Zacherl’s Tavern & Restaurant died at Allegheny General Hospital surrounded by family, after battling heart problems since his 50s, Korbeck said.

Zacherl was a father to four children: Cynthia, Elaine, Ed and John. John Zacherl preceded his father in death in 2018.

“If you asked somebody on the street in Saxonburg, they would talk about how kind and smart he was, and his honesty and integrity,” Cynthia Zacherl said. “He taught us how to be compassionate for people and generous.”

At the restaurant, Zacherl’s children often pitched in to help. For Korbeck, helping out at the restaurant was akin to doing chores around the house.

“On Sunday, we’d go to church, then clean the bar, then go and have some fun — go have a picnic or something,” she said.

Inspired by his uncle, who owned a restaurant in College Park, Md., Zacherl started the business with his brother, Leroy, following a car accident. The restaurant was bought in 1965. Zacherl and his late wife, Eileen, owned the tavern for 57 years, before it closed two years ago.

“Dad still worked at the steel mill while getting the business started,” Cynthia Zacherl said. “It was a lot of long hours, and I can only imagine, back breaking work … my mother helped build it up.”

“He was a foodie before there was such a thing,” she said.

The biggest hit of the year, she said, was fish on Good Friday.

“Friday night was the night to be there,” Korbeck said.

Previously, Cynthia Zacherl said, her father was an insurance salesman who traveled door to door for work. He also worked as a roofer, a farm laborer and a riveter at Ambridge Steel, and he had worked in the maintenance department at the Saxonburg sintering plant, according to his obituary.

“When he was younger, he was a force to be reckoned with,” Cynthia Zacherl said.

She described her father as a jack all of all trades with a knack for fixing and building anything he set his mind to.

Earlier this year, she said her father — in his 80s — had built a garage.

Zacherl’s other pastimes included watching NASCAR and football, going to the beach in New Jersey and playing the accordion. He was given a concertina — a free-reed instrument similar to an accordion — as a boy and took music lessons in Natrona Heights. As a young man, Zacherl played as part of the Starlite Band. He played the accordion at parties, gatherings and Saturday night dances in the area, his daughters said.

During car rides, Korbeck said her father would almost exclusively play polka, stopping for ice cream with his children on the way.

“He would play polka all the time,” Korbeck said. “It’s what we grew up with.”

Korbeck said her father would pick her up from her Catholic boarding school in New Castle on the weekends. When describing the car trips, sometimes quiet, sometimes polka-filled, Korbeck recalled “the quirky stuff he said.”

“He would come up with these one liners, and sometimes they’d just knock you off your feet,” she said.

“He’s just got so much humor,” Cynthia Zacherl said. “He was so funny — he and my mother used to spar back and forth.”

“He and my mom would do that back and forth,” Korbeck said. “They had the same personality.”

“I think when I was a kid, he would just say really wise things to me,” Cynthia Zacherl said. “When I was crying one day — somebody was mean to me, or didn't want to be my friend, some silly thing — he said, ‘You know, some people you may not even know as a grown up. Just have a good day.’”

Zacherl repeated the phrase throughout his life to his daughter, she said.

“He would say, ‘Give them a good day,” Cynthia Zacherl said. “That’s what I remember most. He always said that. It wasn’t, ‘Make me proud,’ it was ‘Give them a good day.’”

“His spirit — he had an unwaverable, happy spirit,” she said. “He was well loved. When he closed the business or something like this happens, you just appreciate how much people loved him just as much as you do.”