Long before a popular bar and restaurant in lower Greenfield was called Big Jim's, it was Kranik's Bar and Grill.

From 1946 until 1974, Mary and Andrew Kranik owned the local watering hole, raising their three children there. Their first-floor kitchen was where the family ate dinner and where Mary Kranik made fish sandwiches and pierogis for the bar patrons while feeding her own family.

"It was a neighborhood bar and most people either worked at J&L or at the Homestead Works, so it was literally open from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. because of shift work," said her daughter, Deborah Kranik Smith, of Elizabeth Township. "She was running back and forth all the time."

Mrs. Kranik died Wednesday from pancreatic cancer at her home on a farm in Elizabeth Township, where she had lived for the past 30 years. She was 85.

Mrs. Kranik was born in Greenfield in 1919 as Mary Magera and grew up in that neighborhood when it was a melting pot of peoples from Eastern Europe. Her own family background was Rusyn, from Slovakia, but her daughter Jacqueline Kranik, of Elizabeth Township, said Mrs. Kranik could speak, read and translate "a lot of Slavic languages," including Polish and Ukrainian.

Throughout her life, she preserved her ethnic traditions, especially at Christmas and Easter. Each year, she would prepare an Easter basket to be blessed at St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Greenfield, filling it with ham, cheese, decorated eggs, salt, butter, bacon or pork, horseradish and bread.

"This year she made the basket but couldn't take it to church," Smith said.

After Mrs. Kranik and her husband married in 1938, they bought the bar on Saline Street and lived upstairs, raising their three children there. Her husband added a first-floor kitchen that served both the family and the restaurant.

"Everything was intertwined. It was one big family business. The only TV was in the bar. If you wanted to watch cartoons, you had to ask the patrons," Smith said.

"I used to come here when I was a kid," said George Ribarchak Jr., of Lincoln Place, who remembered Mrs. Kranik while eating lunch in Big Jim's yesterday. "She used to give me potato chips and pop while the adults were socializing."

In 1961, the Kraniks established a bowling alley, Colonial Lanes and Plantation Lounge in Lincoln, but Mrs. Kranik continued managing the Greenfield bar until 1974. That's when she and her husband moved to Elizabeth Township, where they bought five acres.

Their son, Dr. Anthony D. Kranik, who died in 1999, bought a 150-acre farm adjoining their property and brought in horses and hunting dogs. Both daughters eventually settled on the farm property.

After her husband's death in 1990, Mrs. Kranik spent her life on the farm, even though she was a little timid around the horses.

"She thought every day was like a picture postcard," Smith said.

In addition to her daughters, Mrs. Kranik is survived by two grandchildren.

Friends will be received from 2 to 9 p.m. today at Jefferson Memorial Funeral Home, 301 Curry Hollow Road, Pleasant Hills. A funeral prayer will be held at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow, followed by 10 a.m. services at St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, Saline Street, Greenfield. Entombment will be in Jefferson Memorial Park.