I have fond memories of Mineo’s Pizza in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. Everyone went there. If you grew up in that neighborhood in the late sixties and early seventies, Mineo’s is where memories were made.
My father would buy it for me. He never ate a slice himself. I never saw him eat pizza, or McDonald’s, or anything like that. As the son of a kosher butcher from Poland he liked beef. To my father, a meal was not a meal without meat. The pizza was for me. He bought it because I loved it.
He also bought me clothes from London Dock, a high-end store on Forbes Avenue in the heart of Squirrel Hill. It was where the cool kids shopped. We couldn’t really afford it. He bought it anyway.
My father worked as the maître d' at the Concordia Club, a private Jewish club where some of the wealthiest families in Pittsburgh were members. He knew that world — not as someone who belonged to it, but as someone who served it, every night, for 30 years. He knew its rooms, its rhythms, what people wore and how they carried themselves.
At some point he arranged for me to take ballroom dancing classes in the Concordia Club ballroom. I don’t know how he managed it. I remember feeling completely out of place — a kid in a room that wasn’t built for kids like me, even with my father’s connection to it. In that big intimidating ballroom, a girl came up and asked me to dance. She never let me feel awkward. I don’t remember her name. I wish I did. I’m still grateful to her, all these years later.
In 1978 he bought a Mercedes. I think part of it was that he wanted the members of the Concordia Club to see it — to see him arrive in it, the man who’d spent years bringing them to their tables now pulling up in a car like the ones they drove. I liked it too. I didn’t think about any of that at the time. I just liked riding in it.
I went back to Pittsburgh years ago for a high school reunion. I ate a slice of Mineo’s pizza. It wasn’t good — or it wasn’t what I remembered. I loved it as a kid. At the reunion, I thought it was overrated.
Pittsburgh doesn’t feel like home to me anymore. I used to think that was about the city changing, or me changing, or just time. But I think now it might be something else. I think my father wanted to belong — to a world he’d watched up close for years from the wrong side of the room. And he wanted that for me too. The pizza he wouldn’t eat, the clothes he couldn’t afford, the dancing lessons in a room he knew from serving it, the Mercedes in the club parking lot — all of it was reaching for the same thing, for both of us.
He’s been gone a long time now. Pittsburgh and the pizza are still there. He isn’t.