Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Rose LoBello makes a point of always greeting her customers, such as Nickye Howard. Rose always tells newcomers how her parents started the restaurant where she's worked for 61 years. For many, Rose is the reason for coming. As one regular wrote in her guest book, "Hope your [sic] here forever."

By Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Cars southbound on Route 51 through the Ohio River town of Coraopolis whoosh past a yellow sign for "LoBello's 5th Ave. Spaghetti House. Since 1944."

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette The little restaurant doesn't look much different from when Rose's father, Ross Rowe, built it in 1944. Click photo for larger image. If you go: LoBello's LoBello's Restaurant is at 809 Fifth Ave., Coraopolis; 412-264-9721. It's open from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursdays (all-you-can-eat spaghetti day) and Fridays; 3 to 8:30 p.m. Saturdays; and 3 to 7:30 p.m. Sundays.

Most people don't see the beige brick box of a building, squeezed between a pizza joint and a house. The restaurant never advertises and isn't the kind that gets reviewed, so most of the world has never heard of it.

Enough locals and regulars come in for lunch and dinner to sometimes fill the living room-sized space. Their hostess always is Rose LoBello, or as most of them know her, Rose.

She's just a tiny thing, her head barely visible over the swinging door to the kitchen as she pushes back and forth with $6.95 plates of spaghetti and rigatoni in her signature red sauce.

Some days, alone in the quiet times between rushes, Rose will be standing at the big black gas stove, cooking sauce, or at the counter making ravioli or gnocchi from scratch, and she'll think, What the hell am I doing here?

The answer is, The same thing I've been doing for 61 years: Working in this restaurant.

She quit school to start working here full time and more, usually from 2 in the afternoon to 9 the next morning, seven days a week. That was when she was 14.

Now she's 75.

This is not easy work, especially since these days she's the only cook and only dishwasher and, most of the time, the only server, too.

Working at and running this restaurant is how she raised her four children and how she supports herself. But it's also kept her from doing so many things she wanted to do. Wants to do.

What the hell ...

Then she'll hear one of her customers come in the front door and, as she puts it, "all that goes out the window."

She loves her customers.

And because she loves them, she loves to feed them.

That's pretty much the story of her life.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Rose LoBello reads an order in the kitchen, where she -- and she alone -- makes all the food from scratch, and without steamers or microwaves. She warns customers, "Everything comes off the stove, and you have to wait for it," but most don't seem to mind. Click photo for larger image.

"You have to realize, I never even ate in a restaurant, much less worked in one," says Rose, who moves and talks like a much younger woman. She's still built like a teenager and might pass for one, in her skinny jeans and tight designer T-shirts. She is not shy.

Eating here is like eating at Rose's house and, in fact, the house next door is hers. Locals just call the restaurant "Rose's" or "the Spaghetti House." But her father built it to sell what he called "West Virginia hot dogs."

After emigrating from Italy at age 7, Ross Rowe (the Americanized spelling of Rao) worked in the coal mines and then the mills of Coraopolis, where he met and married Katie Oliver (Americanized from Oliverio). The Depression was on, and Rose, the fourth of their six children, was 5 when he moved the family for a mill job to the West Virginia coal patch of Boomer.

Rose still remembers how foreign and bleak the landscape was. They even had an outhouse!

In one shanty every Thursday, two women made hot dogs -- with chili sauce, mustard, onions and sauerkraut or shredded cabbage -- and sold them for a nickel.

Rose's dad loved those hot dogs and dreamed of opening his own hot dog shop. So after the family moved back to Coraopolis, he did, building it next door to their new house in 1944. Hot dogs topped the menu, but, "He decided to throw ravioli and gnocchi in, just for kicks," Rose says. "It really took off."

The restaurant was so busy that, two weeks after opening, he had to add on a bigger kitchen.

Soon he quit his mill job. The whole family worked in the restaurant. During World War II and after, Coraopolis and its factories boomed, and 24 hours a day, people crowded in to eat.

Even before she quit ninth grade, Rose would leave class to help at lunch and often not make it back. She never did any after-school activities -- no football games, no dances -- only in part because she had to work. Her father was severely strict. He didn't want her even talking to boys while she was taking their orders.

Dark, petite and pretty, she drew the guys, but they learned to keep their distance. Yet one day, despite friends' warnings of "he will kill you," one suitor approached the counter and asked her dad if he could see her.

Her dad asked, You want to marry her?

The guy said yes.

"I guess he was smart," says Rose, who was 19 and hiding back in the kitchen at the time.

And so, three months later, without so much as one date with him, much less anyone else, she married Anthony LoBello.

"I find out now how many liked me," she muses. "It's a shame I didn't know it then."

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Rose LoBello hurries a piece of birthday pie (coconut cream) to one of her regulars. Rose is 75, but she says, "I'm too young to be old. That's just a number." Click photo for larger image.

Rose has certain, fierce rules. One is, "I'm a worker." From age 11 to 16, in addition to working in the restaurant, she was a maid for a wealthy family.

"It was natural to have to do it," she says. Hard work was a fact of life. But it got harder when her parents became ill. Then her husband did, too. He was a controlling man. She doesn't talk about it much, except to say there was a lot of sadness. There also was a lot of love. She struggled with all she had to do to keep the restaurant and her family going.

She used to keep her babies with her in the kitchen, sleeping in lettuce boxes.

"I never left my kids with anyone -- anyone -- unless I went to have another one," she says.

When they were old enough, all four of her children worked here, too.

In 1972, right after her mother, Mom Rowe, died, Rose bought the Spaghetti House from her father -- and took hot dogs off the menu. Being on her own, she says, "It was kind of scary."

It wasn't easy. In 1982, the widening of Fifth Avenue for Route 51 cut the place off from traffic for almost two years and she had to re-mortgage to stay afloat.

She could have tried to sell it. "But what else did I know? Where could I go?"

She still had one son -- and her husband -- at home. So she kept going. Her father died in 1985. Her husband died three years later. When she put up a new sign, her last name was on it.

"Actually, this is my home," Rose says, sitting in this place where she's spent most of six decades. "I feel more comfortable here than at my house."

Above: In this undated photo, which Rose believes was taken at her family's first Coraopolis house, she's the girl in the center, flanked by her brothers Benny, left, and Tony, in front of their parents, Ross and Katie Rowe. (Another brother died as an infant.) Her brothers are dead, but Rose's two sisters, who were born later in Boomer, W.Va., still live in Coraopolis. Below: At the restaurant, she also keeps this photo, above, of her late parents at the front counter. Click photos for larger image.

The restaurant looks hardly changed -- just as customers like it, says Rose, who always tells newcomers how the place was started by her parents. They still are a presence, their faces gazing from the "Ross & Katie" labels -- made for retail containers of the red sauce -- that decorate the tables.

The jukeboxes are gone, but Deco light fixtures hang over the straight-backed wood booths. At night, the whole room glows vintage red and green and blue from the neon in the windows.

"I say everything's antique. Including me," Rose says with her easy laugh. One update her parents made is the Formica tabletops that replaced the old wood ones on the eight booths -- except on the front one, because Rose's brothers ran out of Formica.

Rose pulls away that booth's red vinyl tablecloth to reveal the scribblings and carvings that date back to the teenage boys who used to come to see her. The seats are carved on, too.

Some who've left their marks here are famous, such as former Coraopolis High School, University of Pittsburgh and NFL football coach Foge Fazio. Most are not. But Rose is proud and protective of them as a curator.

She moves her hand under the table and says, "I've even left the gum under there."

A dead museum is not Rose's style. Despite the fact her parents, particularly her father, forbade it, Rose recently started letting customers, especially young ones, carve their names wherever they want on all the booths.

The new graffiti is bright, in contrast to the time-darkened marks. Rose will tell you about the current carvers -- how this family gave her gifts of Florida grapefruit, how this one wants to buy that booth because one late relative always sat there.

Rose knows her customers.

"You haven't been in for three weeks," she admonishes Carol and Bob Farabaugh as they slide into a booth on a recent evening. The couple come so regularly from Findlay that Rose knows without asking that Carol is having the "sewer pipes," as ziti noodles were listed on the menu when Carol started coming here. That was nearly ... 50 years ago. They're surprised it's been so long when they do the math.

Sitting across from Bob, Carol recounts how they hung out here as teenagers. They dated here after he came back from the service. The seatback of the booth behind them is where, one day when Rose's father wasn't looking, they carved their names:

"Bob" and "Peanut."

As much as they adore Rose and her cooking, Carol has no trouble sending her pasta back. Rose forgot to put it on her favorite, oval china dish.

FLAP! Rose pushes through the swinging door to the kitchen, slides the pasta onto the dish and carries it -- FLAP! -- back to the dining room, yelling, "I like to please!"

In the past few years, Rose has cut back to opening Thursdays through Sundays. She employs a couple of part-time servers, including, in the summer, her granddaughter Ashley (which accounts for the "Serving the Public for 4 Generations" on the yellow sign). But Rose does all the cooking -- of the legendary sauce and the pasta, the specials of polenta and tripe, exactly the way her parents cooked them.

She doesn't use microwaves or steamers. "I don't hash it out." When you order potatoes with your fried chicken, she starts out with a whole spud, which she slices and dips in a mix of bread crumbs, cheese and herbs.

A Rose rule: "I don't let anyone touch my food."

Even after a terrible accident while riding in a friend's car three years ago, she resisted her daughter Rosalie Richards' and other relatives' help. She may not be as particular as her father, who insisted sauce be stirred a certain way, but she's yelled at a server for putting the whipped cream on her cream pie (her job).

No matter how busy she is, she greets and chats with customers. This is seriously important.

"I have to come out and say hi to the customers because they kept us there through thick and thin," she says. "Without these people, we wouldn't be here."

She loves talking with her customers, especially kids, and the photos of them and family that are scattered around the place, and the comments they write in her guest book. On a recent quiet afternoon, momentarily alone, she sat down and read it from front to back, and it made her cry.

As her daughter Rosalie puts it, this restaurant "is her life."

It hasn't been all good. In many ways, the business still is a ball and chain. It kept her this spring from attending her granddaughter's graduation (but she did close so she could go to her graduation party). It kept young Rose from doing things her peers took for granted, such as bowling. She never traveled. She never danced.

Even as a girl, she loved music and memorized songs from "Your Hit Parade" books she bought for a nickel. She asked her accordion-playing brother if she could sing during his band's practice, but that wouldn't do for an Italian girl in those days.

Sometimes she'd dance by herself, in the restaurant's kitchen, to songs on the radio.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Mondays are often the highlight of Rose's week, as that's the night she gets to go dancing. All dressed up, she watches out the window of the closed restaurant as she waits for her friend to pick her up. Click photo for larger image.

Looking around the restaurant, Rose says matter-of-factly, "This was the world."

But gradually, she's been expanding her horizons. Unlike her parents, she took a few trips with her grown children. After being discouraged by her father and her husband from having a driver's license, she finally got one at age 56, and loves the independence her Honda Accord gives her, even though she mostly drives it around Coraopolis.

A decade after her husband died, she attended her first singles dance. It was thrilling.

She can't go to the big band dance at the local VFW on Sunday nights, because she's working. But now, most Mondays, when she's not, a lady friend drives her to the White Oak American Legion to go ballroom dancing.

This is one time Rose really dresses up. "I don't wear pants, and I don't wear jeans. I wear dresses. And I'm not going to wear no old lady shoes."

On a recent Monday, she peers excitedly out the window of the closed restaurant, decked out in a long silver-threaded skirt, a laced corset-type top and sequined sweater, and her clear plastic heeled "Cinderella shoes." She holds a plastic bag with two extra pairs of shoes and a bottle of Tylenol, because her feet, particularly the left one that was crushed in the car crash, kill her after a night of dancing. Not that a little pain stops her.

Her friend pulls up out front, and she hops in the car. They arrive at the Legion around 7 p.m., an hour before the dance starts. Rose likes to dance all 14 spots on her dance card, and dance all three dances per number, especially the fast ones. She doesn't even care if the guys can't dance.

"They tell me I'm a good follower," she says. "That I'm light."

Out on the glassy dance floor, floating in the cool grooves of The Modelaires, she sparkles, her eyes and her mouth smiling wide. Her partners know she's quietly singing along.

She sits at her table and sings to herself, "Have you ever been lonely? Have you ever been blue?" Another man walks up and takes her hand for another dreamy spin.

On Tuesdays, it's back to work, because even when the restaurant is closed, Rose goes in to clean and cook. People can't believe she still works at 75. They ask her why she doesn't sell the restaurant so she has more time to dance and do other things.

She decided to sell a few times, but always changed her mind.

"It's because I love it."

For now, Rose is happiest at Rose's, answering calls all day long from her doting adult kids and her 3-year-old granddaughter, cooking, hustling to feed tables full of folks who feel like family, too.

"I never thought of myself doing anything else," she says, as if she's thinking of it the first time.

"I never dreamed that I'd be here 61 years," she adds. "It doesn't seem that long."

On a recent typical Thursday, the crowd of businessmen who've playfully harried her at lunch have left a pile of sauce-covered plates, bowls and utensils. She lugs them back to the kitchen, so she can get ready for what dinner time brings. The cars on Route 51 whoosh past.

"I'm just an ordinary person who has to make a living," she says with a laugh. "That's all."

And what she's doing here is the dishes.

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Rose takes another whirl during the Monday night ballroom dancing at White Oak American Legion Post 701.