When he mentioned Dutch Calabrese – a guy I came to like while covering City Hall 40-some years ago – I decided to call Dutch’s son, Mike, to check it out.
Which is why last Wednesday, the two of us sat at a corner table in Ridgewood Café talking for more than an hour while our food went cold.
It turns out the story of the pizza parlor begins about 1890, when 17-year-old Angelo Calabrese, Mike’s grandfather, was way short on cash for passage to the United States.
His solution was to join the Italian Navy, which was good enough to sail him to Toronto, where he got off the boat for shore leave and didn’t return.
Somehow, Mike said he ended up in Massachusetts and then made his way west, working on the railroad.
The trip produced stories of Chicago soup kitchens; encampments of immigrants grouped by their appearances and, regardless of ethnicity, looked down upon; and ended with Angelo in a Colorado town where Italians familiar with the surface mining of marble were introduced to the underground world of copper mining and the hard edge of virtual indentured servitude.
In the middle of nowhere, with everyone eking out living and captive to the prices of a company-owned store, the financial squeeze felt like an anaconda.
That made the weekly cut of the pay taken by the guy who got them their jobs more and more onerous. Until the fateful day some pay extractors met with unfortunate — and fatal accidents — in the dangerous work environment of the mine.
The shrug of shoulders that accompanied such happenings in those days was in Mike’s voice when he looked up from his chicken soup and said, “Who knows what happened?”
For Angelo, what happened next was that Mike Calabrese’ future great aunt, Cia Bambi Mazzaco, sent for her sister and Mike’s future grandmother, Rose, in Italy. Their arranged marriage was blessed by a Catholic priest in Pueblo, Colorado.
Salud!
A fruitful change
Both the great aunt, Cia Bambi Mazzaco, and her husband, Louis, “worked for the (Italian-owed) Amicon Fruit Company,” Calabrese said, “which is how my family got to Springfield.”
Mike’s best guess at the date is 1905.
Angelo and Alvina settled in Durbin, just west of Springfield on the Lower Valley Pike, where a limestone quarry did a brisk business mining the rock thar would be processed into lime, a key ingredient in plaster used in home construction.
Over his years there, Angelo, earned a reputation as “an industrious little man” as he and Alvina raised their five children Felix, Albert, Robert (called Dutch) Alvina and (“oops,” says Mike Calabrese) Richard.
Born 10 years after the others, Mike said, “Richard wasn’t really part of the older boys’ experience, which included prejudiced treatment and all the things that went along with it” (among them being called wops, dagos and guineas).
After years at the quarry, Angelo became a night watchman and janitor at the Steel Products company on Springfield’s west side and made enough money by the 1930s to buy a building and open a restaurant, he Calabrese Family Nook, at 830 W. Main Street. The family lived upstairs.
As for the pizza?
That would have to wait until the end of the Great Depression and World War II.
To serve and protect
Calabrese said his father Dutch was a godfather time and time again when he came back a hero from the war, in which he fought from North Africa all the way into Germany.
Mike also feels blessed to have had in Felix, the oldest brother, a second – and almost equally storied – father.
Felix’s most adventuresome days were before the war.
“He gained his wealth by being a seller of alcohol, relabeled stuff during Prohibition,” Mike said.
“He drove to Chicago and asked around and ended up dealing with the Mafia. They were a surly group that scared him to death.”
Felix eventually transferred his loyalties to a Chicago branch of the Detroit-centered Purple Gang some will recognized from the lyrics of “Jailhouse Rock.”
With a partner, Felix serviced the Springfield area and two military installations, “bringing so much stuff” to Dayton’s Patterson Field one Christmas “that a general gave him a truck” large enough to handle the load, Calabrese said.
To ensure the success of “Operation Holiday Cheer,” the general wrote and signed a letter instructing police that the vehicle was not to be inspected.
Thinking the letter wouldn’t save them on the snowy day when they got a flat tire in Indiana, one of Felix’s brothers “took off running through a field” when a highway patrolman approached.
Not to worry, Calabrese said: “Felix shows the patrolman a letter, and the patrolman helps him change a tire.”
Like future purveyors of prohibited substances, Felix used his ill-gotten gains of Prohibition to buy a house on Crescent Drive in Springfield, which he renovated, then decorated with furnishings from Chicago’s Merchandise Mart before moving his mother and father in.
Felix later would buy a mansion and run a gambling club called Crescent Farm a mile east of Westville on Route 36, and Calabrese remembers his uncle driving a succession of 1959 models of the long, sleek and winged Cadillac Biarritz.
Felix’s cover story for his parents and all other inquiring minds is that he’d earned all his money from operating a sawmill that he really did own in Southern Ohio.
“They were so proud of him,” Calabrese said.
The wrong pie
Calabrese said that after the war, “Felix left Springfield and enrolled in Cornell School of Food (now Sciences) in Ithaca (N.Y.) He went on to Italy and trained and decided he wanted to open a pizza shop. In 1956, he added an annex to the family restaurant, made his own sauce, cut his own pepperoni, but, at the start, ran into an awkward situation.
“The Wittenberg students all knew what pizza was,” Calabrese said. “But very few people in Springfield knew.”
“They came in, they wanted a pie,” Calabrese said – but didn’t expect one with tomato sauce on the top, much less anchovies.
Although the business “did real well,” Calabrese said, Felix “got bored with it and Cassano’s came to town and other people got into the business.”
Knowing Springfield’s own Gov. James Rhodes, Felix went on work for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, “opened Malabar Farms, among other parks and lived out his life, which ended in 1992 at age 84.
Like his father, Angelo, Calabrese said, the operator of what the family believes to be Springfield’s first pizza place proved to be “an industrious little man.”
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