John Earl Piatt, who as owner of the Perrysburg bakery his parents had founded offered patrons from-scratch bread, pies, cookies, doughnuts, and carefully crafted wedding cakes, died Thursday in Hospice of Northwest Ohio, Perrysburg Township. He was 87.

Mr. Piatt of Perrysburg had congestive heart failure and had been in declining health, his daughter Kim Dane said.

He turned off the ovens and turned out the lights for good on Sept. 29, 1990, more than a half century after his parents, Ruby and Earl Piatt, christened the shop Mrs. Piatt’s Bakery. He was 5 years old when he first came in to help, at his father’s direction.

“I would stand on a box and make cookies,” Mr. Piatt told The Blade in 2000. “I just grew into it. ... It was just a way to keep me busy.”

Baking became his full-time vocation and business. His wife, Kathryn, started working there when she was a Perrysburg High School student. Later, she waited on customers who stopped by for a glazed doughnut, or a dozen, or to sample any of the five or more varieties of cookies offered on any given day. She also guided couples in choosing wedding cakes.

Their children helped at the bakery as well.

“My furthest memories back were working at the bakery,” said Mr. Piatt’s son, Dr. Bruce Piatt. “I just thought that was life, that you grew up working as a family.

“He was really talented at it, and my dad was never a man of many words, but he was always a man of action,” said Dr. Piatt, an orthopedic surgeon. “That was his love language. That was how he showed [customers] he cared. He make their special bread, their special cookies.”

Daughter Lynne Huffman recalled that during the Blizzard of 1978, he found someone with a snowmobile and had baked goods delivered to residents sheltering at Perrysburg High School.

“He was pleasing people. He was helping people,” Mrs. Huffman said.

Her early memories include being at the bakery while her older siblings were at school, sitting in a swing that hung from the ceiling. Later, she got to clean the glass counters — and could keep any money she found on the floor.  

Mr. Piatt worked long hours, often 1 a.m. to 6 p.m. After Thursday and Friday shifts that began at at 7 p.m. and continued overnight, he came home to sleep and went back to the shop.

In wedding season, the hours were longer. He made 32 wedding cakes in a two-week period in June, 1987. The previous June included 120-hour weeks.

Yet he was a volunteer firefighter and attended his children’s school events. He might have worked all night Friday, yet was on hand Saturday for son Bruce’s weekend wrestling tournaments.

“That impressed me, how he was so giving to his family,” Dr. Piatt said. “He would be there for us, no matter the hardship to him. He never complained.”

Mr. Piatt kept up with customer tastes. Croissant and grainy bread varieties had become popular by the mid-1980s, and round layer cakes were losing ground to sheet cakes, he told The Blade then.

Another trend hastened the shop’s demise.

“The day of the small bakery is coming to an end. People want one-stop shopping,” Mr. Piatt said in 1990. Even beyond big supermarkets, many bakeries had abandoned scratch-made goods to use “bag mixes,” he said.

Mrs. Dane said: “Everybody who lived here for a long time remembers what the bakery was.”

He’d heard people call the bakery a piece of history, a landmark. “But landmark doesn’t pay the bills,” he said in 1990.

He didn’t bake much for a couple years afterward, Mrs. Dane said, but then adapted some of his favorites to his home kitchen — coffee cakes, apple and pecan pies.

He also worked in the Perrysburg schools for a decade, retiring in 2000 as Woodland Elementary School’s custodian. For about seven years, the first day of school at Woodland was Apple Pie Day. Mr. Piatt brought 35 homemade pies to school — and supplied the ice cream.

“The teachers at Woodland were all my customers,” Mr. Piatt told The Blade after he retired from the school. “The first grade teachers brought me an apple peeler and I thought I should be doing something with it.”

Born March 12, 1935 to Ruby and Earl Piatt, he was a 1953 graduate of Perrysburg High, where he played football and basketball. He and his wife for years attended Perrysburg sporting events.

He was known for being handy. He built the the family home in Perrysburg and in his garage workshop he made jewelry boxes for his daughters; doll beds for his granddaughters, and shelving for family members and teachers.

His son John Piatt, Jr., died in April, 2019.

Surviving are his wife, the former Kathryn Adams, whom he married Nov. 7, 1953; daughters, Kim Dane, Lynne Huffman, and Kris Piatt; son, Bruce Piatt; brother, Dan Piatt; 13 grandchildren, and 13 great-grandchildren. 

Visitation will be from 1-5 p.m. Sunday at the Witzler-Shank-Walker Funeral Home, Perrysburg, where services will begin at 11 a.m. Monday.

The family suggests tributes to Hospice of Northwest Ohio.

First Published February 11, 2023, 5:00 a.m.