If I were ever to be a prisoner on death row (Yikes!) I know what I’d say when the warden asked me what I’d like for my “last” meal.
“Pizza,” I’d say. “A really good pizza.”
That has long been my favorite “meal” – pizza.
When Richard Blitvich died recently at the age of 94, a bunch of happy pizza memories scampered through my mind.
Blitvitch, who hailed from Hibbing, along with wife Marilyn and business partner Sammy Perella, opened and operated the first pizza joint in St. Cloud, way back in 1956. It was called Sammy’s Pizza.
Until then, I had never heard of pizza.
One night when I was 8 or 9, my oldest brother Jimmy walked into our house and placed on the dining room table a flat paper-wrapped object. I was sitting there at the table as he ripped off the paper from a strange-looking flat round reddish blob. It looked like a poor critter that had been squashed on the street by a car.
“What is that?!” I asked, alarmed.
“A pizza,” said Jimmy. “Wanna piece?”
“Yuck! Are you kidding? Looks like road kill. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot fork.”
“Well, maybe it ain’t pretty,” he said, “but it sure as hell tastes good!”
“What’s on top of it?”
“Mushrooms,” he said, causing me to cringe in disgust.
As Jimmy began to devour that mess, I felt like throwing up. And yet . . . and yet . . . the road kill did smell so good! So good, in fact, I asked to taste a piece if he’d take the mushrooms off of it. He did and handed me a piece.
Hesitating a bit, I tasted it, and it was love at first bite! It was incredibly tasty with its mixture of tomato sauce, cheese, some kind of spices and a crispy crust that tasted a wee bit smoky, like it had been baked over a campfire.
“Oh my God!” I shouted. “I love it! Can I have another piece?”
So, removing mushrooms, I greedily ate another and another, until Jimmy grabbed fast for the last piece on the cardboard platter.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“A new place called Sam’s Pizza. Downtown St. Cloud. It just opened.”
“Well, go back and get some more!”
“So, the road kill was pretty tasty after all, hunh?” Jimmy said, with teasing sarcasm.
“Yup, it sure was!”
Right there and then, my life-long love affair with pizza had begun
Sammy’s Pizza was a fun place to eat after seeing a movie at one of St. Cloud’s three downtown theaters – the Paramount, the Hayes or the Eastman. I was a big movie buff in those days.
The neighbors, too, were nuts about Sammy’s. Many a night I’d be down at our family’s best friends, the Fahnhorsts, who lived a block south of us. I can still hear their mother, Alma, shouting so many times “Ricky, Gary, Ronnie – put on some Elvis Presley and order a large Sammy’s pizza!”
Years later, the House of Pizza opened in downtown St. Cloud, right up Fifth Avenue north of my house. It, too, served to-die-for pizzas. I’d have them delivered to me so often during my college years.
Sad to say, Sammy’s, which had moved later to Waite Park, closed in 2018, and the downtown House of Pizza closed too.
When I lived and worked in Alexandria, my favorite lunch place was Jake’s Pizza, also a downtown joint whose scrumptious pizzas rivaled those of Sammy’s and House of Pizza.
When traveling in Italy in May 1981, I made sure to go to Naples, the “birthplace” of pizza. There, I stopped at a shop and bought a few slices. They were tasty but not as good as those from Sammy’s, the House and Jake’s.
My favorite pizza topping? The very thing that repulsed me on that first pizza so many years ago. Yup. Mushrooms!
