Loyal to a then-bustling Herminie, she soon married a nearby dairy farmer.
Aside from a few short breaks for child rearing, she spent all of her adult life working for company stores, including the former Herminie Ocean No. 1 Mine's evolution as a grocery store.
On Dec. 30, 2000, Mellinger, 78, completed her last day of work at Bill's Dandy Dollar on Sewickley Street.
Inside the store's tiny office, the hands of a Marlboro Man clock crept closer to quitting time. Promptly at 1 p.m., Mellinger slipped a coat over her mint green sweater, dabbed at her eyes and nose with a tissue and declared, 'OK, I'm out of here - I think.'
Decades ago, she said, Ocean No. 1 Mine and Ocean No. 2 Mine - in what was then referred to as Herminie No. 2 - kept the two towns jumping.
'Each had its own personality,' Mellinger recalled while counting cashier drawer receipts for the last time.
Her father, Edward L. Chew, was a mine foreman. Her mother, Myrtle M. Chew, reared 12 children, four of whom are still living.
'I'm number eight,' Mellinger said.
She began her employment at the Herminie No. 2 company store. She later moved to the Herminie No. 1 store - which continued sundry and grocer operations and twice changed hands after the mines shut down in the late 1930s.
'We even had a post office in the (first) store,' she said. 'The kids would sit on the steps and watch me while I put the mail in the pigeonholes. ... We had everything from soup to nuts. We sold clothing, toys, furniture, appliances, hardware, shoes. It was where everyone came to shop.'
And sometimes, the shop came to them.
'Many, many times I went door-to-door and took orders to be delivered,' she said. 'In all kinds of weather, I went out. ... My smallest order was for a 3-cent spool of thread.'
Back then, employees entered purchases in a ledger, allowing customers to run a monthly tab. There were no cash registers. Cash payments were made via a primitive pneumatic tube system, with money slipped into cups and run by wire back to the office, where change was made.
Pasta was measured out and sold from huge boxes, sauerkraut from kegs, flour from bags. 'Taking inventory was a three-week job,' Mellinger said.
'I have every paycheck I ever got. My first paycheck, I was getting $11 every two weeks. It seemed like a lot of money at that time,' she said.
In 1943, Katy Chew met her future husband. She and a girlfriend met John T. Mellinger and his brother as the men were driving to see a plane that had landed nearby.
Herminie was hopping back then. 'It had a lot of joints,' she said. 'We had a clothing store here, a jewelry shop, a theater, restaurants, a hotel.'
John Mellinger did not own a car, so their courting was done on foot. 'People said he was either in love or crazy,' she said. 'I prefer to think it was the first.'
The two married in 1947. They lived with her parents for the first four years, then moved to his family's dairy farm. She continued to work, taking some time off as daughters Nancy Lee Mangeri, 49, of Kansas, Kathie Lynn Plack, 46, of Herminie, and Susan Kay McCall, 41, of Florida, joined the family. Mellinger has two grandchildren.
It was a time when servicemen sent their photos home to their families, who displayed them in the company store window.
'Families used to bring their babies and weigh them on the (store) scales,' she said. 'I've watched many families grow up. ... That's what I'm going to miss the most, all of the customers. ... It's been my life.'
Cindy and Thomas Smith took over the store from Cindy's father, William Freund, who owned the business from 1969-1993.
Before it became Bill's Dandy Dollar, Cindy Smith said, it was the Eureka coal mining company store. 'It sold everything from safety pins and needles to appliances and groceries,' she said.
She described Mellinger as 'very dedicated. You don't find many like Katy today.
'It's a sad thing,' she said of Mellinger's decision to retire. 'She'll be missed. She's very reliable.
'She's very easy to get along with,' Cindy Smith said. 'She's popular with the employees and with the customers. She's almost a fixture, after all these years. She didn't have to be told to do her job. You could just count on her to do it.'
Katy worked full time until she was 65.
'I used to work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays,' she said. 'When I hit 65, that was the first thing to go.'
Asked why she did not retire then, she just laughed and said she didn't know. She did cut back, working 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day except Sunday and Monday.
John Mellinger died in 1984. 'At that point, I was very grateful to be working,' she said. 'It kept me busy.'
And she seldom missed a day.
'I'd have to be pretty darn sick to miss work,' she said. 'I guess being from the old school, that's the way you were taught.'
Mellinger said she has no real plans for retirement. She will continue bowling Monday nights with the Veterans of Foreign Wars Ladies Auxiliary in Herminie. Although she normally bowls in the 124 range, one night last August she rolled a 232 game. 'That place went crazy,' she said. 'That was a night to remember. I got more compliments than Carter has pills.'
Her co-workers, long having heard her comment that she wished she had kept a journal, presented her with a blank memory book on Saturday.
'It will probably take awhile for it to sink in,' she said. 'I'll probably think I'm just on vacation.'
