Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette
	Crews clean up the water damage on the first floor of the Jenny Lee Bakery yesterday after fire devastated the landmark McKees Rocks operation on Thanksgiving Day.

A list of history's great calamities would not include Thursday's fire at the Jenny Lee Bakery in McKees Rocks. No deaths, no life-threatening injuries, no loss of homestead or family pet. The business, said Scott Baker, could reopen by mid-December, if contractors move with great haste.

But calamity is a matter of perspective. Consider the story of Beth and Michael Liberatore, the Beaver County couple who married yesterday at Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church in McKees Rocks. The wedding cake they'd ordered was lost in the Thanksgiving Day blaze.

What goes through a couple's minds in such an event?

"Oh my God, what are we going to do?" said Mr. Liberatore, agreeing to an interview request roughly 20 minutes before his 1 p.m. church nuptials were to begin, when any reasonable person would have excused the groom for punching the reporter right in the nose.

By 4 p.m. Thursday, news of the fire reached the couple. Presumably by 4:01, Beth Liberatore was freaking out. By 5:15 p.m. they received a call from the Baker family, telling them not to worry. And by 8 a.m. yesterday, Jenny Lee delivered the cake's specs to Bethel Park's Bethel Bakery, which spent the next three hours doing what customarily takes three days, or even three weeks -- building a wedding cake.

"Normally, it's staged over a couple days. Assembly is done by one person, somebody else does icing," explained John Walsh, owner of Bethel Bakery. "But we have a full crew today. Everybody just jumped on it. [The] biggest commitment a bakery has is to a bride on her wedding day."

(Mr. Liberatore and his wife, in the eyes of the state, have been married for three years thanks to a 2003 civil service, but the importance of this cake, on this day, wasn't diminished by their pre-existing marital status. Yesterday's church ceremony "is the one that counts," he said.)

The finished product was a single-tier, white-batter cake with raspberry filling, with all-white icing and decorative swags on the edges. It was delivered by noon, and met Mrs. Liberatore's standards. "Absolutely beautiful," Mr. Liberatore said.

Calamity averted, Mr. Walsh and Mr. Baker said.

Also un-calamitous, but surely depressing, was the ruination of a second-floor room in the bakery that kept many of the company's heirlooms. Mr. Baker picked through that room yesterday, searching a closet with dozens of old scrolls and mounds of paperwork, the product of his grandfather's pack-rat ways. One of the items appeared to be a blueprint of the bakery.

In the center of the room was an antique glass-topped table. Beneath the glass, now in shards, is an assortment of paraphernalia from the bakery's history. Some of the items -- hand-painted advertisements, black-and-white photos, most of them badly damaged -- date to Jenny Lee's predecessor, 7 Baker Brothers, and to Mr. Baker's great-grandfather, Michael Baker, a German immigrant who opened the first of the family's bakeries in Pittsburgh's West End, in 1875.

The second-floor fire, battled by 70 firefighters from eight companies, caused about $1 million in damage. That figure includes structural damage as well as the loss of ingredients, finished baked goods and a few pieces of machinery from the candy room, including a machine that covers boxes of candy in plastic, and a $25,000 custom-made tart machine.

Contractors wasted no time in beginning the rehabilitation of the bakery's four interconnected buildings. Mr. Baker, the grandson of Jenny Lee Bakery's founder, said workers from Duckstein Contracting arrived at the bakery before he did on Thursday afternoon.

By yesterday morning, workers were sweeping charred bits out of the stairwell, using vacuums to suck moisture from the floor, running extension cords from the one building with electrical service to the others.

Downtown's Market Square bakery was open yesterday, but it will be closed indefinitely, as will the Crafton outlet. Mr. Baker said those two stores could reopen soon if Jenny Lee decides to buy products from another supplier, or if it borrows space from a nearby bakery to make its own products. If that happens, the outlets might have something to sell by the first week of December.

"It's been total support," Mr. Baker said. Nearby bakeries and regular customers have been calling, saying, "'Scott, whatever we can do to help, let us know.' "

Mr. Baker said firefighters told him that the fire was probably caused by faulty wiring but that an official determination hadn't been made yet. The building where the fire started is at least 100 years old and has housed the bakery company's production equipment since 1941. Mr. Baker said he suspected the wiring hadn't been updated since then, and knew for certain it hadn't been updated since he started working there in 1984.