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Posted by: Jim Donnelly on 4/30/1998@01:04hrs:
Anybody remember the first taste of pizza? I remember the first time I ever ate pizza. It must have been during 1945 or 1946, and at the time I had never met anybody who had ever heard of pizza (we were just thick micks, after all). But I remember one Friday evening in spring when we were all sitting out on the porch with our citronella. My Uncle Gene had come down from County Bronx to spend a weekend with us, as he did two or three times a year. At one point in the conversation Gene said, "I had a new kind of thing to eat last week," and we all wanted to know what it was. He told us it was an Italian sort of thing.
"But," we all said, "what is it?" And Gene told us that it was "a kind of... well, it's a kind of pie. It's a cheese and tomato pie."
Everybody gagged at the thought, but Uncle Gene kept on about how good it was. He said, "You buy it in a place called a piz-ZERia.
At that point I said that I passed one of them on my paper route, and Gene was astounded by that. "You mean there's a piz-ZERia down here?" I said, "Sure. I've never been in it, but I pass it every day." He sprang out of his chair, pointed at me, and shouted: "Take me there!"
So off we went, and we came home with my first pizza and it turned out to be everything he had said it was. In those days, remember, it was precisely a cheese and tomato pie; we didn't know that you could buy it with other stuff on top of it. Maybe you couldn't. We bought it at a little place in West Brighton on the corner of Broadway and a dead end that I think of as Seneca Street.