The McGinnis Sisters Special Food Stores: Remembering a Connection Between Mother and Daughters

Local businesses become part of the fabric of a community, especially those related to food and groceries. Customers sample new products, exchange recipes, and pick up ingredients needed for cherished family traditions, year after year. Such places aren’t just part of the community, they create their own community.

The History Center has long been interested in collections that document local businesses. When the McGinnis Sisters Special Food Stores announced that they were closing in 2019, we reached out and began working with the family to preserve artifacts, documents, photographs, and a wealth of audio-visual material that told the story of a business that was a mainstay of the South Hills and Monroeville and expanded into the North Hills during more than 70 years of operation. While part of their story appeared elsewhere on our blog, a fuller picture emerged this past year, when a History Center virtual program featured a discussion with multiple generations of the family.

A Mother’s Story Takes Center Stage

While the story of the McGinnis Sisters—Bonnie McGinnis Vello, Noreen McGinnis Campbell, and Sharon McGinnis Young—has long been praised as an example of women business leaders working together to carry a family operation to new heights, the role played by their mother, Rosella Gardill McGinnis, in the start of the business has not always gotten the attention it deserved. The story typically focused on family patriarch Elwood, and his decision in 1946, faced with a lack of jobs after World War II, to start a fruit and produce stand in Baldwin. But that decision was a leap of faith for both members of the young couple, who had two small children and a third on the way. As Rosella remembered in a video clip from WTAE’s “Pittsburgh’s Talking” show with host Ann Devlin around 1990, when Elwood first suggested opening a fruit stand, the family had no experience in the grocery business. Rosella recalled that she looked at him and thought, “Well, he doesn’t know a banana from an orange.”

But they did open that stand, with about $1,200 (the equivalent of about $17,000 today) and a lot of hard work. On the day the store opened in December 1946, Rosella stopped by to do a quality check on the produce and then proceeded to the hospital to deliver the couple’s third child while Elwood stayed behind. That pattern would be repeated multiple times; the McGinnis family eventually welcomed eight childrenIn those early days, Rosella continued to do quality control checks on the fruit and vegetables they offered. She was more knowledgeable and taught Elwood how to recognize and select the freshest and ripest produce. Their story isn’t just a reminder of the resolve needed to start a new business. It evoked the changes reshaping American society in the postwar years of the late 1940s. Veterans and new young couples faced a world in transition. The contraction of wartime defense production made jobs scarcer just as the first wave of the baby boom emerged, prompted by young men and women moving forward with lives put on hold during World War II.