Bank in Bethel Park celebrates 100th birthday of longtime customer
Bud and Benedict Serratore
Benedict P. Serratore, right, passes the gavel to Theodore Klotzbaugh as new president of South Hills Multi-List Realtors Inc. in 1959.
When the United States entered World War II, 25-year-old Benedict P. Serratore did his party by enlisting in the Army Air Corps.
“They told me I was too old to be a pilot,” he recalled. “They said, ‘But you can be a gunner.’ So they put me in gunnery school. And I graduated from gunnery school at the head of a class of 500. So they kept me there as an instructor.”
A group of Brentwood Bank executives and employees listened intently as Serratore spoke about his experiences Aug. 24, three days after he turned 100. They hosted a birthday celebration in honor of their exceptionally longtime customer at South Park Shops branch in Bethel Park.
“I always liked Brentwood Federal,” he said, referring to a previous designation for the 95-year-old financial institution. “It probably was the first bank I had an account in. I opened an account when I came home from the Army. It had to be 1945. That’s when I started an account.”
At the time, he got to know Hobart A. Moore Sr., the bank’s first president.
“I remember Mr. Moore telling me that when he started out, they had an association of a few people. They had assets of $10,000,” he recalled. “That’s all they had.”
Serratore, who owned South Pittsburgh Realty Co., opened his first business account with the bank in 1949.
“He would bring us business. We would do a lot of mortgages with him, with his clients,” Vince Cassano, vice president for residential and consumer lending, said.
A native of the Hill District, Serratore settled in Whitehall after the war and now lives in Bethel Park, where son Benedict Jr. – everyone calls him Bud – also is a resident.
“A friend in the service said he had a brother-in-law in real estate, and I think that really interested my dad,” the younger Serratore, who took over South Pittsburgh Realty and ran it for more than three decades, said.
Benedict Sr. also has two daughters, Sister of Charity Joyce Serratore and Vicki Whitelaw. He was married to his late wife, Veronica, for 69 years.