Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 223, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 September 1912 — Tales of GOTHAM and other CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Tales of GOTHAM and other CITIES

Expert Says Pies Always in Demand

NEW YORK.—SoL Robinski, who had taken Phil Breitenkopfs place at the Busy Bee’s pie counter, while Phil was up)in the Catskills on his vacation, said he had never heard, of Simple Simon and the pieman, b 6 that he could not go back to the very beginning of the history oi the pie industry. But Sol could glance backward from bis Ann street booth over a period of eleven and one-half yean of service in the making, carving and serving of fresh pies, and it was his opinion that, take it the year round, winter and summer, and all the rest, pie was about the best seller in Ann street. Sol even went so far as to gay that the pie eaters outnumbered the devotees of the ice cream cone and the hot waffles combined—that Is among the office boy connoisseurs of Ann street Which was a flat contradiction of the startling news which throbbed over the wires the other day from Chicago, that the American people were losing their taste for pie. As luck would have It, the Chicago canard reached Ann street just as the rush hour for pies—pies and other things, of course, like those luscious hot roasted frankfurters, those tempting one-cent ice cream cones, and

those tall, ambeivcolored glasses of one-cent orangeade, to mention only a few of the Busy Bee’s noontime delicacies. Sol Robinski said that tho right and the only man to see about this here pie question was Phil Breiten-i kopf, than whom there was no higher pleautbority in the whole city. "Phil’s the boy that can talk to you: about pie,” explained Sol. “That fellow is a regular whatyer call genius when It comes to knowing what kind of a pie It is before he cuts it. How does he know it? How can I tell you? If I knew, wouldn’t 1 do it myself?” Sol has a wide, all-round experience in Ann street and they say he Is the highest salaried man in the Busy Bee’s employ, but in the matter of pie he is not the equal of his old tutor, Phil Breltenkopf. “In hot weather, it is all pie, pie, pie. For three cents they get half a pie, and for two cents they get s glass of milk. Perhaps if they have more than five cents for lunch, y’understand, they blow it in on root beer or ice cream co-en, but first they must have pie and milk.” While he talked, Sol kept both hands working dishing out pids. There were all kinds. As Sol said, there was fresh apfel and huckleberry and custard and lemon meringk. All very fine. The boys would point to this kind or that, and Sol would bisect it with his long knife, balance tbe half on the fiat of the blade and pass a toothsome morsel out over the heads of the crowd, never once dropping tho pie or missing the right customer.