Mendel Trope and his wife Clara owned M. Trope Saloon at 347 E Mound St. from about 1897 to about 1910. By 1918, they owned a grocery and saloon at the corner of Fulton and Parsons Avenue. They lived upstairs at 617 ½ Fulton.
Mendel had immigrated from Russia in about 1885. Their children, Edith, Lena, and Myron, all worked in the grocery as young people along with Clara’s mother, Rosa, and sister, Sarah Finkelstein.
And my dad used to weigh food on a scale – a nickel’s worth of sugar, a nickel’s worth of . . . everything in nickels and dimes. Those were the amounts of the transactions because the average person who came into my father’s store was in no position to buy large amounts. And that was a continuous operation for quite a few years until we moved out.
Click to hear Myron Trope talk about his father in his Oral History.