Reward for airport workers is a reward for pizzeria, too

On an ordinary day, the sleepy little pizza shop that sits beneath a bright blue awning on Lincoln Avenue in Prospect Park sends out, maybe, 150 orders.

But this, as Dave Shearn will tell you, was no ordinary time for Cornerstone Pizza, the small business he runs with James "Buzz" Villas, his partner from Mantua, Gloucester County.

Enter the US Airways employee, the friend of a customer, who phoned at 1 p.m. Tuesday, to say: "How fast can you get 50 pizzas down here? And I need another 100 by 6:30."

"Down here" meant Terminal B of the Philadelphia International Airport, where scores of workers on overtime had been pushing to send weather-weary passengers on their way.

"How fast" was 3 hours and 15 minutes to get all 150 pizzas baked, boxed, and delivered hot to a senior manager who met deliverymen on the drop-off platform to sign the credit card slip.

In all, 150 pizzas went to the airline Tuesday and 330 went out Wednesday. What's more, the shop maintained the brisk pace Tuesday while meeting its usual demand, and more, for the Eagles game. It remained open to the public Wednesday, too.

"I'm scrapping all over the place to get the ingredients," said Shearn, 40. "We were in Defcon 4 panic mode."

There was sauce and dough to be made from scratch. There were toppings - pepperoni, mushrooms, black olives, onion, and green peppers - to be readied. There were three ovens to be fired up. There were boxes to be folded and set up on counters.

On Wednesday, Shearn found himself scrambling for pizza boxes and ordered more from the distributor. He called in extra bakers and deliverymen. One worker even stayed overnight to ready the ingredients for morning.

"It's amazing. It's absolutely crazy. It's unprecedented. It's more than a week's worth of food in a couple of days," said Beth Shearn, 40, wife of the co-owner, who enjoyed the busy scene.

Once at the airport, the pizzas were stacked neatly on several luggage carts, or, in one case, a wheeled flatbed vehicle that could be pushed anywhere in the terminal.

According to Todd Lehmacher, spokesman for US Airways in Philadelphia, the pizzas were a reward for employees who worked long hours after Sunday's blizzard to break the logjam of stranded passengers. By Wednesday, the logjam was gone.

"We had a lot of people here for three days," he said. "Our employees are the best, and that's why we're keeping them here and fed - and happy.

Each pie that went to the airline, Shearn said, was a large, priced at $9, plus more for an array of toppings. Figuring two slices per person, each eight-slice pie fed four people.

Shearn learned Wednesday after providing two days' worth of pizza that the airline had a surprise in store for him: an order Thursday for 330 pizzas. That makes a total of 810 over three days.

He said the third day's order would earn the shop "several thousand" dollars, well above an average week's take. He called it "a nice Christmas boost."

" 'Everybody likes your pizza,' " Shearn said he was told. "They want to do it again tomorrow. That makes me feel good. It keeps me awake. It really blows my mind."