Oct 6, 2002 By Glenn Tunney 9 min read

The story has been told many times. The Brownsville boy was stationed in the Hawaiian Islands during World War II. The letter he sent back to the States was like thousands of others mailed daily by homesick young men and women. But this wasn’t a letter to his family or his sweetheart.

This was a letter to the folks at Fiddle’s, a confectionery nestled almost directly under Brownsville’s inter-county bridge. The staff and clientele at Fiddle’s, so much a part of the young man’s life, were like a second family to him. So he wrote them a letter.

Nothing about the letter was unique. It asked how the folks at the confectionery were doing and described the daily routine of military life in Hawaii. But there was something different about the envelope in which it arrived. In the space where the name of the addressee should have been written, there was instead a primitive sketch.

It was a drawing of a fiddle.

The letter was delivered to the confectionery by the Brownsville post office without a problem. There could be no doubt as to the intended recipient.

Words were unnecessary. The folks at Fiddle’s enjoyed a laugh at the cleverness of the writer but were not particularly surprised that the letter had reached its destination. After all . . .

Could there be anybody that hadn’t heard of Fiddle’s?

The story may be true, or it may be a small town legend. Mention Fiddle’s to anyone who grew up in Brownsville, and the likely response will be a smile, followed by a story. Somewhere in the story you will hear the words “hot dog.” The story will probably be followed by another one. And then another. Until you wonder just what nerve you’ve struck.

If nostalgia were a disease, Fiddle’s would have to be quarantined.

The place overflows with memories. Enter Fiddle’s today, sit in an ancient wooden booth, and study the hundreds of initials carved in the wood over the past 70 years. You will soon feel the urge to slide over in the booth to make room for the ghosts of teen-agers past, joining you for a trip down Memory Lane.

Fiddle’s Confectionery has been in business since World War I, and it has changed surprisingly little since its heyday in the forties and fifties. A popular Brownsville landmark that has stood the test of time, it is a unique success story that began nearly a century ago with the arrival in America of the original “Fiddle” – Fadell Hallal.

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“My dad, Fadell Hallal, was born in 1896 in an area of northern Syria that is referred to as the Fertile Crescent,” said 72-year-old Brownsville attorney George Hallal. George and I were sitting in his Spring Street home on Brownsville’s North Side, discussing the origin of his father’s confectionery.

“My dad’s father,” George continued, “was George Hallal, same name as mine. And he was a merchant in the Syrian village of Mashta al-helu.”

“You mentioned to me that your father was a Christian,” I said, “living in a part of the world that is predominantly Muslim.”

“That’s right. In fact, my father’s uncle, George Ellien, who came to Brownsville from the same region of Syria before my dad did, was one of the founders of St. Ellien’s Orthodox Church, directly across Spring Street from this house. My mother’s father, whose name was George Mitchell, was actually the first permanent priest at St. Ellien’s.

“The only other St. Ellien’s Orthodox Church is a church in Syria. St. Ellien was a regional saint, a physician in that area of the world, and he was a martyr. There were a lot of Christian martyrs in the Middle East, because Syria was mostly Muslim.”

“And the village your father grew up in . . .?”

“Was an Orthodox village. My father’s village and my mother’s village were both near a castle called Krak des Chevaliers, which was once a Crusader castle and is still there today. Christians lived in nearby villages for protection and avoided the general population of Syrians.”

“Your father came to America at the age of 16. Why did he want to leave Syria?”

“My father hoped to come to America to find a better life and to eventually bring his mother and sisters here. He could not come as soon as he had hoped, however, because his father was ill. In fact, Fadell left school as a boy because of his father’s illness.

“His father had a dry goods store, and when his father couldn’t run it any more, Fadell, even though he was an adolescent, stepped in. But in the old country, when the old man dies or gets sick, everybody cancels out the debts. They don’t pay, and they had no rule of law enabling debts to be collected.

“I remember my dad telling me how he rode a mule from village to village trying to collect, and they wouldn’t give him anything. That was when he said to his father, ‘Let me go to America. I can make money, and I can send it to you.’ But his father said, ‘No, you stay here.’

“After Fadell’s father died, Fadell said to his mother, Jamilie, ‘I’m going to America.’

“She said, ‘All right, but you’re not going without me.'”

“Fadell said, ‘I’ll make money and send for you.’

“His mother said, ‘You take me, then I know you’ll bring your sisters over there too.’ So the two of them came to America together in June 1912. Unfortunately, of Fadell’s 11 brothers and sisters in Syria, only two survived to adulthood. With little medicine and few doctors over there, you can see why they wanted to leave.

“Later they did send for his two surviving sisters, but one of them died before she could come over. The other, Bolomia, came to Brownsville and lived with them until she married John Asa. John, then later his nephew ‘Ki,’ ran a bar next to Fiddle’s Confectionery.

“My father and his mother came directly from Syria to Brownsville.

Here they joined their relatives who had come to Brownsville from Syria around the turn of the century, including my father’s three uncles, Mike, Beatty, and George Ellien and his aunt, Nabeha Asa. Nabeha’s husband, Joseph Asa, had emigrated from the village of Uyouni al wadi, near my father’s village.

“When Fadell arrived in Brownsville, his uncle, George Ellien, was already running the Empire Confectionery in South Brownsville, which he had established in 1910. My dad got a job working for George for up to 20 hours per day.”

“Was the Empire Confectionery located in the building where Fiddle’s is today?”

“I don’t think George Ellien’s confectionery was originally located where Fiddle’s is now. He had a store somewhere on lower High Street before that. My dad may have started working in that store, or he may have started at Fiddle’s present location, of that I am not sure. But he did eventually work in the Empire Confectionery in the same building where Fiddle’s is today.”

“How did Fadell adapt to life in his new country?”

“He couldn’t read or write English. Fred Chalfant had a night school in Brownsville where he taught English to the immigrants. My dad wanted to go to the school, but his uncle George said ‘No, you have to work,’ so he couldn’t go. Instead, my dad learned to read and write behind the counter at the confectionery. If he was looking at the paper, he would ask people, what is this word? So he learned without going to school.

“Eventually his uncle Beatty Ellien left Brownsville and moved to New York. Then around 1918, his uncle George also decided to move to New York to open a business there. So George sold the Empire Confectionery to my dad, who was about 22 years old.”

“And your dad changed the confectionery’s name?”

“My dad pronounced his name Fa-DELL,” explained George Hallal, “and we think from that came his nickname, Fiddle, which he probably acquired soon after arriving in Brownsville. So yes, he changed the confectionery’s name to ‘Fiddle’s.'”

“Was the Empire Confectionery as large as Fiddle’s is today?”

“No. There were three storerooms in the space that is now occupied by Fiddle’s. The Empire Confectionery occupied one storeroom, and I am told a second storeroom was occupied by a sub-station of the U. S. Post Office. I don’t know what was in the third one.

“My father bought the confectionery business from his uncle in 1918, but he did not buy the building itself until 1923, the year he married my mother, Pearl Mitchell. After he bought the building, he enlarged the confectionery into the other two storerooms. He also made two five-room apartments upstairs, and sometime after 1924 moved into one of those apartments with his wife, his first-born child Regina, and his mother.”

“Where did Fadell and Pearl live before they moved into the apartment over Fiddle’s?”

“When my parents were first married in 1923, they were living in West Brownsville. It is my understanding that he may have left his uncle’s employ at some point, because my dad started a bowling alley in West Brownsville. I believe it was in the Joe Asa building, which is at the end of the Inter-County bridge. I think the building is still marked ‘Joe Asa Building’ on top of it.

“My parents, their four children, and my grandmother later lived in the apartment over Fiddle’s until 1941, when we moved into the house where I now live on the corner of Spring Street and Fifth Avenue.”

By the 1940s, Fiddle’s was an active gathering place for businessmen, students, shoppers, and even the occasional trainman, who would hop off a slow-moving train to grab a sandwich or package of tobacco. Next week, we will venture inside the Fiddle’s of those years, take a seat in one of the booths, stick our chewing gum under the tabletop, and wait for our friends to arrive. Join us next Sunday in Fiddle’s.

Comments about Glenn Tunney’s columns may be sent to day editor Mark O’Keefe, 8 – 18 East Church Street, Uniontown, Pa. or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com . Glenn Tunney may be contacted at 724-785-3201, glenatun@hhs.net or 6068 National Pike East, Grindstone, PA 15442. Past articles are on the Web at

http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~glenntunneycolumn/