E.E. Bandy Building
The 110-year-old Bandy Building at the corner of Cavitt Avenue and Third Street was recently razed. Originally built in 1911, it was named the Starr Building after its first owners Violetta & Albert Q Starr (236-238 Cavitt Avenue). The building served many tenants over the years including a jeweler & optician, post office, ice cream parlor, clothing store, Full Gospel Church, poolroom, and lastly, Bandy’s Printing Shop that opened here in 1943.
Affectionately called, “Old man Bandy” by some Trafford residents to differentiate the father from the son who also operated the printing business in the building, Everette Emmette Bandy lived to be 100 years old. Everette was born in 1883, in South Webster, OH, the oldest of eight children. He started taking photographs when he was 11 years old, learning the photography business at a photo studio in Columbus, OH where he worked. Bandy later moved to West Virginia where he opened his own studio.
Everette Bandy told a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter that he met his wife Beatrice in Mannington, WV, in 1921; he was 27 and she was 16. While he was courting his wife, someone told his future father-in-law that Everette was already married and had left his wife and children to start a photography studio. To keep Beatrice from marrying such a rogue, her father sold her clothing and piano. Bandy said, "I went down to her house at 12 o'clock at night, knocked on her window and said, you want to get married?" Beatrice said yes, and her cousins were waiting near her house to whisk the couple off for the ceremony. But she didn't have any shoes. Bandy said, "I had to carry her through weeds that high (he gestures to his waist), 100 yards to the car.” Several months later, his father-in-law, who had learned that the story about his son-in-law was a lie, invited the couple to dinner. "He come to be the best friend I ever had," Everette Bandy said of his father-in-law. The couple would have two sons, Edwin and Carl.
Everette Emmette Bandy 1893–1993 and Beatrice Yost Bandy 1904–1996 (front) Edwin Clair Bandy 1923–2018, Carl Leroy Bandy 1925–2021 (back): Photo courtesy Kevin Bandy.
In 1934, Everette brought his family to Trafford in his Model T Ford. "I was printing for a fellow, and he moved to Trafford, and he wanted me to come," Bandy said. "I made Murrysville the first yearbook the school ever had." He did the same for Pitcairn, and in 1937, Bandy printed Trafford High’s first yearbook.
In 1940, Everette Bandy helped start the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs. He and a group of fellow conservationists were instrumental in the drafting and passage of the Pennsylvania Strip Mining Act of 1963. Bandy traveled throughout the state photographing the devastation that resulted from strip mining. In 1982, he was inducted into the Westmoreland County Sportsmen's LeagueHall of Fame for his leadership role in the league and longtime interest and devotion to conservation.
Bandy never received formal education beyond the eighth grade, but he took the advice of a teacher who told him he would do fine if he continued to educate himself. He followed the advice. "There's two things you got to have science and knowledge. If you have those two things, you can work anything out."
While the building may have been razed, the legacy of Everette E. Bandy deserves to be honored and remembered in the chronicles of Trafford and Westmoreland County History.
Excerpts of this post were taken from the May 13, 1993, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article written by Monica L. Hayes.
