For all of his working life Paul’s slumbers have ended at 2.30 — that’s 2.30 in the morning.

But such has been the challenge in life for one of the district’s best known pastrycooks — until now.

Next week Paul will be enjoying his first working day ‘sleep ins’ since 1965, and that’s a tiring record by anyone’s calculation.

Paul is —or at least was — the proprietor of Cranes’ Pies, one of the city’s oldest surviving family businesses and truly a byword in Lithgow for 60 years.

Now he’s retiring and new owners are taking over this week.

Paul’s late parents, Don and Jessie, met in Adaminaby (in the Snowy Mountains) where she was a Lithgow girl working as a school teacher and he was a pastrycook.

They married and moved to Crookwell where they opened a pastrycook business.

But Jessie was homesick and persuaded her recently acquired husband they should move back to Lithgow.

By a quirk of fortune the only house available for rental to this couple in 1948 was a home in Ferro Street — and it had a bakery in the back yard (believed to have previously been operated by the Staines family).

And so began the Crane family pie making dynasty, a business that has lasted for 60 years and is set to continue, albeit as a new family operation but still trading as Cranes Pies and still from that bakery in Ferro Street.

Paul began helping his father in the bakery when he was just 10 years old.

When he left school at 17 it was natural that he would enter the business — and he’s been making Crane’s Pies ever since.

Generations of footy fans at the Lithgow Showground have grown up and grown old on these pies as the family company was the supplier to the canteen below the grandstand.

“I remember as a kid sitting with dad watching the football when there was an urgent call over the public address system,” he said.

“They were calling ‘if Don Crane is in the crowd we’ve run out of pies’!”.