A smorgasbord of sweets overwhelms the senses of those who walk through the door of the chalet-styled building on Brainard Street in Harvard.
There’s the heady aroma of fresh-baked cinnamon buns and danish. A rainbow of lemon, grasshopper, strawberry and chocolate tortes. The coarse textures of hearty rye breads and pumpernickels. And, of course, there’s the sweet sound of indulgence as customers at the Swiss Maid Bakery order up their favorite jeans-busters of the day.
“Most of this is made from Grandpa’s formulas,” said Kurt Stricker, 33, his arms spreading in front of a glass case filled with sugared bismarks, streusel-topped coffee cakes, and glossy, brown-domed loaves of bread.
Kurt and his brothers, Paul, 31, and Eric, 27, have run the Swiss Maid Bakery since 1987, taking on a sweet business that has been in their family for three generations. It is a business that has grown substantially from its beginnings on North Avenue in Chicago.
Today, Swiss Maid Bakery’s 40 employees bake more than 250 different items. A good number of those sweets and breads are sold over the counter at the bakery’s Harvard and Woodstock locations, of course. But the bakery has found a growing audience as their mail-order business for their signature sweets, Swiss Cinnamon Bears and Pecan Sticky Bears, are shipped across the country and around the world.
That’s a long way from a bakery on North Avenue. But it’s a story rich with ironic twists and turns that weaves together the history of two families.
It began in the late 1920s, when Kurt, Eric and Paul’s grandparents, the Planzers and the Strickers, immigrated to Chicago from Europe. Both families opened bakeries within blocks of each other on North Avenue.
“My husband’s aunt, she said to me, `Now is not the time to start a business’,” recalled Rose Stricker. “My language, my American, wasn’t so good yet. But we did this anyway.”
Rose Stricker, who was born in Germany almost 88 years ago and lived for a time in Switzerland with her Swiss-born husband, Anton, remembered how both the Planzers and the Strickers labored long hours in their respective bakeries, each trying to make a go of a small business in an extremely competitive climate-no less than five bakeries were located in the area-and during the Depression.
“We got maybe 18 cents for a beautiful cake, not enough to keep going, because people didn’t have the money to pay more,” Rose Stricker recalled. The Planzers’ daughter, Shirley, and the Strickers’ son, Tony, helped out at their family bakeries. Debt, though, eventually claimed the Strickers’ bakery.
By this time, Rose Stricker said, her husband was ill. Their friends the Planzers had moved to rural Harvard and had bought a bakery, and they asked the Strickers to move to Harvard as well and open up another bakery in their building. “So we bought a farm and moved out there,” Rose recalled.
That was in 1943. Two years later Anton died at the age of 45. For a time Rose ran the bakery alone, but she sold it back to the Planzers in 1949.
The next year, Tony Stricker and Shirley Planzer got married.
“My husband told me after meeting Shirley for the first time that she was the one for our son,” Rose recalled.
Tony had started working for his father-in-law at the bakery driving a truck during World War II. “We sold off the farm because I was going to go in the service, but I ended up being classified 4-F instead,” said Tony.
“I was born and raised around bakeries and didn’t want anything to do with it, but my father-in-law said come to work for him until I decided what I wanted to do,” he said. “I ended up buying him out and I lasted almost 30 years in the business.”
Today, Tony, 65, and Shirley, 62, are “retired” and grandparents to 10 youngsters. Yet both still work in the business.
“I do this for fun now. This is my hobby. But (my sons) make all the decisions, and I’m just the old man around here,” Tony joked as he pulled giant trays of crisp breadsticks out of an oven where more pans of breadsticks rotate to perfection.
Since the sons took over the business in 1987, the bakery has expanded considerably. No longer do mom and pop provide all the labor and service, as Tony and Shirley and their parents once did.
Now the bakery employes 40 people and has a second shop in Woodstock. In addition to their repertoire of more than 250 baked goods (with chocolate raised doughnuts the biggest seller, at more than 100 dozen a week), the bakeries feature a menu of deli foods prepared fresh daily at the Woodstock property.
Swiss Maid Bakery also operates a mail-order business that ships their most popular items, the trademarked Swiss Cinnamon Bear, an iced cinnamon roll, and Sticky Pecan Bear, a creation glazed with honey and laden with pecans, across the United States and into other countries, including Japan and Germany.
“It’s been a big item for companies to send out to their customers,” Kurt said of the sweet rolls that weigh in at a half-pound each. The bakery sends out more than 1,000 four-roll packages a month.
But even though they’ve expanded the business beyond what their grandparents may have imagined, the Stricker sons continue to follow the high standards set by their parents.
From the customers who have patronized Swiss Maid Bakery for decades to professional bakers who know who has the best buns in the business, the Strickers’ bakery has commanded both loyalty and respect.
Jim Uhlir, a transplanted Chicagoan who lives in Harvard, stops in the bakery two or three times a week and thinks the baked goods at Swiss Maid rival any that can be found in Chicago.
“I just went out for fruit juice this morning, but I had to stop,” said Uhlir, who bought the shop’s last caramel sticky bun of the day. “There are some great bakeries in Chicago, but this place holds up to the best of them.”
“They’re really on top of their business,” said Mike Olesen of the O & H Bakery in Racine, Wis., one of 11 members of a professional baking society known as the Dirty Dozen to which the Strickers also belong.
While many of the recipes used today are the same used by the first generation of Stricker and Planzer bakers, Swiss Maid Bakery is a decidedly modern operation that has an industry reputation for mechanical innovations that have vastly improved the efficiency of the business.
And many of the innovative designs found in this shop have come from Tony’s inventiveness.
“If there’s a better way to do it, Tony comes up with it,” said Olesen of the O & H Bakery. “He’s always looking for a better way. And if something goes wrong (with a piece of equipment), he’ll find something that will work better so he won’t have to deal with that problem again.”
“This is a shop that is more highly mechanized than most,” Tony acknowledged, a fact he attributes largely to the years when he lived on the family farm in Harvard. “Farming was a lot more mechanical than the bakery, so I was equipment-minded and wanted to find an easier way to do things.”
His zeal for inventing new machines led to his design of a streusel machine that makes quick and efficient work of turning sugar, butter and flour into the crumbly mixture that tops baked goods such as coffee cakes and muffins.
Tony also turned into reality Olesen’s idea for a proof box to hold dough during the rising, or proofing, process. And he also developed a specialized production table for an Evanston bakery. In fact, Tony’s designs are in use in bakeries not only across the country but also in Japan.
Tony’s designs have considerably shortened the workday for his sons.
“My folks were never home,” said Paul, who, like his brothers, recalls coming into the bakery at a very young age to break eggs. “My mom would run home to get us breakfast and off to school, and we’d have nannies during the summer. They worked a lot. They had less volume and longer hours in a much smaller shop.”
Shirley acknowledged that those years took most of her time, but she said she was never more than a phone call away. She recalls going into the bakery in the early morning hours while her children were still sleeping. And if she got home in the early afternoon, she sometimes had time for a nap with her youngest children until her older children came home from school. Besides running the household and working in the bakery, she still found time to drive her six sons to Rockford so they could play hockey.
As their sons grew older and started leaving home, the couple thought about selling the business, but Tony resisted.
“He wanted to wait and see if one of the boys would decide to come into the business,” Shirley said. “And one of Tony’s happiest times was when our sons decided to do that. We were hoping for at least one of them to come in but never dreamed that three of them would.”
The other three sons chose other paths. One is in real estate, another is a recent college grad, and the third is in high school.
But perhaps Kurt’s, Eric’s and Paul’s decisions to enter the business weren’t as serendipitous as it sounds. Shirley said that after she and Tony started to have children they sat down one day and talked about all the things they had disliked about working in their family’s bakeries when they were children.
“We didn’t want them to hate the bakery before they loved it,” Shirley explained.
She and Tony realized that neither had enjoyed the constant scraping and washing of baking pans, so they decided their children would not have that job.
“But if a pan washer didn’t come in one day, they had to know how to do it,” Shirley said. “And we wanted them to actually make things in the bakery so they would have a feeling of creativity.”
The couple also insisted that each of their sons work part time in the bakery while in high school. Some of them even worked there during summers off from college because, Tony explained, “I paid them real well.”
The couple also gave each son the opportunity to go to college and discover their own career path.
“We all went to college, but my father always said that if we couldn’t find a job we could come into the bakery,” said Kurt, who studied food science and business at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and graduated in 1982. After a stint at a professional baking school, he joined the family business.
Now, said Shirley, Kurt’s role in the business is that of “the captain that makes this ship sail.”
Paul earned a degree in agricultural business before joining the family firm, and he handles the finances. Eric studied for a year at Western Illinois University before coming to work full time in the bakery.
“I was always interested in the culinary arts, but this is where I ended up,” said Eric, who handles catering and the maintenance and repair of equipment.
Tony’s commitment to mechanizing the business as much as possible has meant the family no longer works 18-hour days, though that sometimes happens during the peak seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas. More typically, the work day begins around 5 a.m. and may end as early as noon. They also work five-day work weeks rather than the seven-day work week that was more typical of bakeries in the past.
While machinery in the shop accomplishes many tasks, from mixing, kneading and rolling out dough to bagging cookies, it doesn’t supply all the nuances that characterize a bakery’s unique products.
That, says Tony, can come only from experience.
“You can never learn all this stuff,” he said. “There are all kinds of little tricks. You can give two bakers the same formula and have them follow it exactly, but in the end you’ll have two completely different products.”
Whereas years ago bakers were extremely competitive and closemouthed about their businesses, today they’re much more open and willing to share their tips and recipes. Much of that sharing takes place with the Dirty Dozen, the group of 11 bakery owners, including the Gladstone Bakery in Chicago and the Meurer Bakery in Milwaukee, who meet monthly to discuss their baked goods.
Membership is by invitation only, and today’s members are mostly the sons of the bakers who originally formed the group in the 1920s.
“They’re good bakers, all of them,” said Tony. “One no-vote kills (a potential membershsip). But if it’s someone’s son, it takes two no votes.”
The Dirty Dozen meets in the bakery of a member who has chosen a topic for discussion. One month they may compare notes on how everyone makes their lemon meringue pies. In addition to discussing business, the club provides an opportunity to socialize as well.
“Years ago you would never be allowed to go into someone else’s bakery,” said Tony. “But today the business is shrinking. It’s so small now that you all know each other, and now we give each other whatever anyone needs.”
As for the recipes used at Swiss Maid Bakery, many are still originals from the family’s grandparents. Still, the sons are always willing to try new things. Sometimes customers bring in recipes for them to try. Or they may bake a recipe they’ve sampled elsewhere-like Granny’s Cookies, a dark, thin and lacy chocolate chip cookie the bakery added to its repertoire after Kurt sampled it at a friend’s house during a Super Bowl gathering.
“They’re really great, just like Grandma used to make,” said Kurt.
Their newest venture is providing baked goods to schools and other non-profit groups for fundraising projects. “We got into fundraising . . . through the Market Day programs at schools,” Kurt said of the Villa Park-based program that sells meats, produce and baked goods primarily to schools, which then receive a portion of the profits when they resell them.
While the sons run the business, Tony and Shirley are in what Shirley describes as “limbo retirement.” They still like to come in, but now they have time for travel.
And octogenarian Rose Stricker still participates in the business, too, though not as much as she used to.
“I’m the oldest one in the company,” said Rose, who likes to keep an eye on the people who work in the shop. “It’s much different today. It was a lot harder back then. But I was alone and had to do it. I wouldn’t go back and do it again, but I’m happy I had it then.”
