Family bakery keeps going: Pepe’s made changes, is 100
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 04-16-05
The neighborhood bakery was a fixture in old Amsterdam. Maldutis Bakery at East Main and Dean in the East End was known for its light and dark rye. Rye bread was also a staple at Wojnar’s, later the Belmont Bakery at Belmont and Third on Park Hill near the old Bigelow Sanford mills.
Many of the old family bakeries succumbed to mass-produced baked goods. But Pepe’s Bakery at 55 Broad Street on Amsterdam’s South Side has been a family tradition for one hundred years.
Salvatore Pepe and his wife Vincenza left Mussomeli in Sicily for Amsterdam and established an Italian import business. Soon, however, Pepe and a friend started a bakery on River Street in 1905.
In those days, dough was mixed by hand and a horse-drawn wagon was used to deliver bread door-to-door. Pepe’s son Ralph, who also had been born in Italy, worked in the business even as a boy. An early 20th century picture shows Ralph and his father each holding one end of a loaf of bread, standing in front of their horse and wagon on Amsterdam’s West Main Street.
So far, every succeeding generation in the Pepe family has found a way to continue the baking tradition.
In 1924, Ralph Pepe moved the bakery to its current Broad Street location, bought machinery and a Model T Ford to make deliveries. Ralph was mentioned in a previous history column. He was the man who married Eva Mancini, one of the daughters of Queen Libby of Fonda, Elizabeth Cassell Mancini. When Ralph and Eva’s first child was born in 1923, Queen Libby flagged down an express train in Fonda so she could make it to St. Mary’s hospital in time for her daughter’s Caesarean section.
Ralph and Eva named their second child Salvatore, in honor of the family patriarch. Young Salvatore Pepe worked in the family bakery as a boy, as did his brothers and sisters.
After World War II service, Salvatore earned a Siena College degree in biology and worked at a General Electric rocket research laboratory before deciding to follow in the family tradition at the bakery with his wife Geraldine. Brothers Alfonso and Ralph, Junior also worked in the business until 1972.
The Pepe family modernized the bakery, perhaps one of the reasons it is the only one of three Italian bakeries in Amsterdam to survive into the new millennium. Automatic wrapping and slicing began in 1963.
Two of Salvatore’s sons, Ralph and Paul, operate the bakery today with help from dad. They are on the job in the early morning hours so that mixing the dough can begin at 5 a.m. Loaves go into the ovens at 8 a.m. and the neighborhood is infused with the warm, homey smell of baking bread.
The brothers bake about 700 loaves of bread and nearly 400 packages of rolls a day. Pepe’s baked goods are sold as far north as Northville and as far west as St. Johnsville.
Their most popular product is the sliced small loaf. They also make “Shorty’s loaf,” a large unsliced loaf originally made for Shorty’s Tavern, also on Broad Street. In addition, Pepe’s Bakery produces sub and round rolls, breadcrumbs, pizza and pizza shells, frozen dough, rye bread, babka, pepper biscuits and friselle.
Ralph and Paul each have two children, a boy and a girl. Perhaps the children will follow their ancestors into the bakery business. Dominique and Allison are students at Amsterdam High who sometimes can be found working at the bakery. Sammy is currently working on a pharmacy degree at Northeastern University while Nicholas studies architecture at Syracuse University.
Some information for this article came from a story written years ago by Gazette columnist Sam Zurlo.
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