James Walter Shaver, second child of the union of Charles and Cleona Shaver, was born in Altoona, but grew to young manhood in Wilmerding, where his parents had moved when he was but a small infant. Like his older brother he received his grade schooling in the Wilmerding Public School and graduated from the Union High School, in Turtle Creek, in 1928.

Also attracted to drug stores he utilized his spare after school hours working in the pharmacy of C. G. Schwartz, in Wilmerding. His first ambition was to practice Odontology, and proprietor Schwartz encouraged him in his selection of a vocation. Resting a year after graduation from High school, he worked, full time, in the pharmacy and in 1929 he entered the University of Pittsburgh as a student in the School of Dentistry.

Unfortunately, circumstances compelled his parents to temporarily stop his University schooling and for almost two years he interested himself in the compounding of prescriptions and drug accessories. By this time he was convinced that Pharmacy was his future vocation, and upon reentering the University, he chose the School of Pharmacy, from which he graduated in 1938. As a student he rated high in his grades and later his alertness and quickness in grasping the intricacies of the profession amazed his employer who later elected him as a partner in a new pharmacy.

A few years after graduation he responded to an opportunity to repay his former employer for the generous interest he took in him, by managing the Schwartz pharmacy while the proprietor was hospitalized. His vocation was interrupted by the call to arms when our country was attacked and James was summoned in the initial draft for soldiers.
After serving the entire period of the conflict he returned to his home, then in Wilkinsburg, where the family had moved in 1940. He first entered a pharmacy in the city of Pittsburgh, but later returned to
the Turtle Creek Valley, to the Borough of Turtle Creek. Across the street from where he was employed was a branch office of the Mellon Bank and Trust Company, where Miss Anna Mabel Ansel, his future bride, was employed.

In 1950 he, with Mr. Schwartz, who had disposed of his Wilmerding pharmacy, opened a modernly equipped pharmacy in Monongahela, Pa, about fourteen miles from Pittsburgh. In that same year, on September 18, 1950, he married Miss Ansel and established a home near his business in Monongahela, Pa. From this union four children blessed his home: Anna Jean, James Luther, Kathryn Rebecca and Robert Charles Shaver.

Record of WWII service