The Flag Of Sicily

Forget About It…

Growing up in Mercer County, New Jersey, during the twentieth century, I was very close to Italians who were right off the boat. These folks were great Americans — they came from their homeland, worked hard, and became quite wealthy. It was a very formative experience for me, and I was blessed because they all loved me. I’ll never forget them or what they instilled in me, especially the Buonos, the Botonis, and, of course, the Polizzis.

Joseph Buono was the son of Genaro Buono, who arrived in the States in the 1950s and opened Victor’s Pizza on Nassau Street in Princeton. Joe was one of the best athletes ever to attend my alma mater, Lawrence High School. I worked for him throughout my teenage and college years at his landscaping company in Hopewell. He inspired me to be a quarterback, and I ended up playing college football as a result. Joe worked for my dad’s roofing company in the 70s, and Dad’s Trenton-native secretary referred to him as “Guyseppe” in her South Jersey accent, which I also used.

One of my first jobs was putting the Sunday papers together at Lawrenceville Deli for Albert Botoni, who was also right off the boat. I was twelve years old at the time and had just started Lawrence Middle School. “ATB” was also successful and quite wealthy, and he started out laying tile in Trenton in the 1940s. He ended up owning several restaurants and delis, as well as property down the shore. His three sons, Robert, Anthony, and Dino, all worked for him at the Deli and later at Lawrenceville Pizza next door. I would eventually work the grill and deliver pie for Dino at the pizzeria during my junior and senior years in high school.

These Italian Americans worked incredibly hard and were well-respected members of the community. The sons, however, were all major ball-busters, ladies and gentlemen. Vintage New Jersey ball-busting… ain’t nothing like it. It is born out of extreme sarcasm and is intended to give the recipient a very hard time. Many conversations were built around ball-busting. Guyseppe was probably the best at it because he would bust balls and people wouldn’t even know it was happening. His two brothers, Vincent “Nino” and David, once worked for him at his landscaping business, and the mornings before we started work were absolutely hysterical, with Guyseppe being brutal to the point where the other brothers would start yelling and screaming back at him. He was so bad that he would even call his own mother, Vincenza, who was also right off the boat, Rudy Tomjanovich, who coached the Houston Rockets in the early 90s… because he said he looked like her.

The Botoni brothers were also bad, but they were obvious when they started busting balls. On a side note, Anthony taught me how to bet on football during the early days of me working for them. I was very close with Dino, who ran Lawrenceville Pizza. I gave him the nickname “Heavy D” after a popular music performer at the time, and it stuck. He loved it. He would refer to himself simply as “HD”. Heavy was a standout football player at Lawrence High School and graduated in 1978, during the height of the disco era. We would often listen to classics outside of the shop on Saturday nights after we closed, and we would slowly get inebriated on vodka and cranberry. Dino would call a liquor store up the street, and I would cruise up there and walk out with a handle of “Vodka City,” which we would enjoy during “pregame” festivities.

My Italian associates were a piece of work… However, Angelo Polizzi was a totally different breed. Busting Balls didn’t happen around “Ang,” because he was a serious guy I always looked up to as larger than life. He always loved me, ever since I was 8 years old. I was very close to his two sons, Salvatore and Gianni. He was truly one of a kind and a force of nature.

Angelo Polizzi immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, from Sicily in the early 60s. Bensonhurst, to be exact, folks, and he met his beautiful wife, Grace Fontana, there. Angelo was an incredible soccer player who played for the Italian national team and briefly for the New York Cosmos. A proud American, Angelo enlisted in the US Army and became an instructor at the Jungle Warfare Training Center in Panama. Because he was so good at jungle operations, they kept him there instead of shipping him off to Vietnam. Many of his Army buddies would end up wounded or dead in that horrible war (which I was born during the last year of it). I was told years later by Grace that Angelo was exposed to Agent Orange that they were using to defoliate in Panama.

Angelo was a legend in Mercer County for his keen business sense. He was the first to bring the “two slices and a coke” business model to the area. Before that, you would order a whole pie at a Trenton-area restaurant known for “tomato pies,” and that was it. Angelo’s model featured premade pies behind a glass case, and you would reheat them in the oven for a minute. He started with a joint in Princeton Shopping Center and then opened Pizza City in Ewing. In the late seventies, he opened Parkway Pizza, which became one of the busiest restaurants in the area. Angelo also owned “S&S” amusements, which owned and leased the newest video games, a HUGE business at the time. He built an arcade inside Parkway, and the joint was packed all the time. My mother was born and raised in Ewing, and we would occasionally stop by to see the Polizzis and eat. As soon as I walked in, Angelo would open the cash register, take an empty soda cup, and load it up with quarters. It was the best gift ever, and my mother would smoke cigarettes and talk with Grace while I played video games for the next hour.

Angelo would then replicate that business model across different parts of the country, including Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona. He was very wealthy and had a beautiful house right on historic Province Line Road in Princeton. They had a large satellite receiver in the backyard, and he was the first to have satellite TV in the early 80s. He also had a few of his arcade machines in his finished basement. Everyone loved going over to Sal’s house in the early 80s because Angelo had cutting-edge technology in America. He was very successful, and the fact that he achieved all of this in less than twenty years after coming to America was an incredible accomplishment.

One of Angelo’s Parkway Pizzas in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is still in business today.

I started working for Angelo during my junior year of high school. I was the grill man at Parkway Pizza, and it was my responsibility to handle everything outside of pizza. Each joint had its own pie man whose only focus was making pies all day — they didn’t have to deal with anything else except cleaning their counter or the ovens. I actually learned how to make cheesesteaks there — something I’ll always be very proud of. For the record, I’ll say our steaks were better than the Philadelphia cheesesteaks. We would get our bread fresh daily from Italian Peoples Bakery in Trenton, and we used sliced American cheese, not that whiz crap that was popular downtown, which was about a 30-minute drive from Trenton.

The Polizzis were very proud Sicilians… who considered themselves a distinct race apart from Italians. Sure, they identified as Italians, but they had their own dialect and genetics. They even had their own style of pizza, which I first tried in 1982 at Parkway Pizza. A Sicilian pie is thicker and square, baked in a deeper pan — now I suppose it’s called a “grandma pizza”. At any rate, I knew the difference between Sicilians and Italians at an early age. Sicilians had dark hair and olive skin, whereas the Botonis from central Italy were lighter — Dino actually had blond hair. Sicilians were very loving and passionate, but also very hot-blooded. You didn’t want to be around Angelo when he was upset, and he frequently wore a very serious look. He always lightened up around me, though…because he trusted and loved me.

I’ve got a lot of very fond memories of Angelo, and I’ll never forget him. When I was working at Parkway in the early 90s, he wasn’t around too often because he had other business interests elsewhere. He was always going to see business associates in Brooklyn or down in Cherry Hill, South Jersey. When he did show up, it would totally brighten up my day because he was always larger than life. I had also become a decent football player in Mercer County, and he was very proud of me for that. There was one moment that had a transformative effect on me, even to this day.

It was a Sunday at Parkway in 1992, and I was several months away from graduating from high school. I was behind the counter. It was quiet, and I looked out into the large parking lot and saw Angelo pull up in his Oldsmobile Tornado (he always drove nice cars — Gracie drove a beautiful Cadillac Eldorado convertible for years). Angelo strutted into his joint wearing a black Raiders football jacket and immediately went to the espresso machine to make himself one.

A notable Italian American from New York wearing a Raiders jacket.

I walked over to him, excited to see him. He had that serious look in his eyes, again not at me but how he looked at life in general. He might have just come up from Cherry Hill, where he met some of his other Sicilian friends. We started talking about football, and he talked about a team, then quickly said to me, “Forget About It.” I was somewhat puzzled by the expression, and he then asked me if I knew what it meant. I told the boss that I did not, and he carefully explained what the phrase means. It actually has several different meanings — one positive, one negative, and one just neutral. Years later, a film called Donnie Brasco came out, and it does a great job of describing what “Forget About It” means:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS6zJ7IsJkM

From that moment on, I incorporated it into my daily vocabulary and used it frequently.

Sadly, Ang died in 2007, the same year as my father. Gracie had told me she believed he was sick from exposure to Agent Orange while serving as a Jungle Warfare Instructor in Panama. Parkway closed its doors several years ago after 30 very good years in Mercer County. Angelo’s “two slices and a Coke” business model spread across the country. However, pizzerias are different now — mainly because people don’t go out to eat anymore and have food delivered. The famous arcade machines are now built into small mobile devices, and you are one button away from playing any of those arcade classics on your phone.

Even to this day, I find myself using the phrase “Forget About It,” and for a moment, I think back to the late and certainly great Angelo Polizzi. American-made and someone who should never be forgotten.

Rest in Peace, Ang…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd5RMOZhhxE