By the time Chas. Fingerhut Bakeries opens at 6 a.m., a few customers have gathered outside in what has been a Saturday morning ritual for almost a century.
The reward for their vigil is the enticing aroma of thick, warm loaves of rye bread and tempting sweet rolls wafting over them into the intersection of Cermak Road and Central Avenue.
The windows of the Cicero store, at 5537 W. Cermak Rd., are covered with hand-painted signs luring customers to the famous breads, form cakes and other delicacies.
They have depended on the neighborhood bakery since 1895, when the Fingerhut family immigrated from Czechoslovakia. Seven generations of Fingerhut bakers have provided area residents with a taste of home.
Customers return repeatedly for the sweet houska loaves, the kolacky and especially the babi rye, still made according to owner Herb Fingerhut Jr.`s great-great-grandmother`s recipe. (Babi is the Bohemian word for grandmother.) Cicero native Louis Kymola, 76, says the rye bread his wife, Mary, makes is as good as Fingerhut`s, but he buys it at the bakery anyway. ”It`s so much work,” he says. ”It`s easier to come here, and it`s very good.”
Kymola has brought his granddaughter, Valerie Kymola of Guntown, Miss., to show off the old neighborhood. ”Food is medicine,” he tells her, leaving with a large bag of goodies.
Although the neighborhood has a fast-food restaurant just up the street and a supermarket with a bakery across from Fingerhut`s, many longtime residents still prefer the personal touch.
”I look for quality,” says Lorraine Carroll, 62, who has been patronizing Fingerhut`s for 40 years. ”You go to the neighborhood butcher and get it cut the way you want. You go to the neighborhood bakery and find what you want, not just what they want to throw out there.”
Fingerhut took over the store`s management when his father retired a few years ago. But he credits bakery operations manager Linda DeSimone with retaining the personal touch. ”Linda keeps the front going,” he says. ”That allows me to be back here baking.”
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DeSimone handles the store`s bookkeeping and ordering but is most concerned about making sure customers are satisfied.
On a busy Saturday morning, she wanders into the hectic cake-making area to determine if Fingerhut is making the proper color of roses for a wedding cake order she handled.
”I promised her dusty pink roses,” says DeSimone, who has given Fingerhut a ribbon provided by the bride as a color guide. ”Not bright pink, normal pink. But dusty pink.”
Fingerhut shows her the roses he has made for the five-tier cake, to be delivered that afternoon. DeSimone holds the ribbon against the roses and pronounces them perfect.
”I believe in giving the customer something he can`t get elsewhere,”
DeSimone says. While in the cake-making area in the store`s back shop, where employees are quickly applying fresh strawberries and icing onto cakes, she stops to chat with Anna Podczerwski about a cake being made in the shape of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle for a child`s birthday.
Podczerwski, who moved to Cicero from rural Poland a few years ago, adds a thick layer of bright green icing to the cake and begins to decorate it. It will be done in 20 minutes.
DeSimone leaves her bookkeeping and rose overseeing for a quick tour of the front. She quickly rearranges a few items and straightens others for optimum customer appeal. ”These are just a few tricks I learned from Herbie`s grandfather and grandmother,” she says.
DeSimone, 38, has worked at Fingerhut`s for 22 years, beginning as a cookie-maker for Fingerhut`s grandfather Charles. She heard about the job from her mother, Marie Linhart, who was working for the butcher next door when she discovered that Fingerhut`s needed help with the Christmas cookie rush.
DeSimone worked at Fingerhut`s for two years before her 1970 graduation from Morton East High School in Cicero. She then left for a secretarial job, but she wasn`t gone long.
When she returned to Fingerhut`s one Saturday a year later to buy a pie, Charles Fingerhut talked her into coming back to handle secretarial duties, and those grew into her present position.
Her ”part-time” job amounts to up to 40 hours each week, including two week days and Saturday and Sunday. ”A regular job around here is about 60 hours each week,” she says with a laugh.
The job allows her time with her children-Jillian, 7, and Jeffrey, 5,-and her husband, who works in law enforcement.
Fingerhut`s and its 30 employees are DeSimone`s second family, she says. She and Fingerhut have children the same age, and they help one another attend soccer games and school events by rearranging schedules.
Customers have become family too. DeSimone and others who wait on customers in the cheery front of the store greet them by name. ”Take your time,” DeSimone tells customers who are having a hard time deciding on what to take home.
DeSimone`s many years with Fingerhut`s have taught her a certain rhythm to the business and its customers. ”They come early in the morning for bread and sweet rolls,” she says. ”Later in the morning, people come for cakes. When the weather is really nice, many customers spend time outside and run by at the end of the day before we close.”
There have been changes in the business since DeSimone started, many due to the neighborhood`s changing nature. ”Our older customers tend to buy bread, rolls and cookies, while (others) who have moved here seem to like the sweeter cakes and pastries.”
The trend toward healthier eating has prompted customers to buy more rye bread and other healthy foods, she adds. ”The slack we might have seen in the bread business as older people die has been taken up by younger folks concerned about health.”
Just as the hand mixing of rye bread has given way to 800-pound mixing machines, so has the bakery scene changed.
”There used to be several bakeries and butchers,” says Aurelia Kulawiak, a customer of Fingerhut`s who has lived in Cicero for 37 years.
”Now only a few of the old stores are left.”
Fingerhut`s is one that plans to stick around. It is very much a part of the neighborhood`s fabric, says DeSimone, who grew up at Central Avenue and 26th Street, Cicero.
She recalls an incident about a decade ago when a local group was raising money to help an injured child. ”One of the men came to us and asked us to donate a cake for a thank you party for those who had contributed,” she says. ”He just asked for a small cake, whatever we felt we could do.”
When the man came to retrieve the cake a few days later, Herb Fingerhut Sr. presented him with an elaborate, beautiful cake for 200 people. ”The man was so appreciative he just started crying right out in the store,” DeSimone says. ”All of the employees were crying, and so were the customers.
”We`re all neighbors here.”
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The bakery has a mail-order business and another store at 9110 Broadway in Brookfield. But some customers come to the store from far away.
Visitor James Zboril, 72, of Cincinnati comes in with his daughters, Therese Martin and Maryellen Pater, also of Cincinnati to purchase some of his favorite items.
Zboril grew up near Cicero and was a regular at Fingerhut`s before moving to Cincinnati more than 30 years ago. Back in the old neighborhood on family business, Zboril is busy ordering rye bread and other goodies to take home with him.
”We never miss (doing) this,” Martin says. ”We grew up with the food and the nationality, and I can`t imagine coming back without going to the baker, the butcher and other places that are still home to him.”