When I was a kid, magic came into town.
Pizza!
Braddock, Pennsylvania. Pizza?
We would all chip in and one of the older guys with a car would go to Vincent’s Pizza, just a few miles over the hill in North Braddock, and get pizzas and we would all sit on the stairs in front of McCarthy’s house and gorge ourselves.
Heaven!
Little did I know that this was the best pizza in the world.
Now we all know that the best pizza in the world is in Naples, maybe Cannes, New Haven?
Not.
It’s Vincent’s…or it was, Vincent’s.
Vincent passed a decade or so ago and once the master is gone, the legacy disappears.
When I lived in New York, I missed Vincent’s Pizza. When I had Pizza in Naples, I would compare. Cannes? I had heard of the pizza in New Haven from a New York friend who would drive there just for the pizza. I was in New Haven and went to the famous, Pepe. It was good, maybe very good, but it wasn’t Vincent’s.
Through the years, Vincent and I became friends. I shot an IRON CITY BEER commercial at his place and when Vincent came to LA, he would drop off some pizza at my office.
I thought a lot about what made his pizza great. He had developed a sourdough recipe in San Francisco, and the ingredients were always fresh. I always ordered a mushroom and sausage pie and the sausage alone was a meal. I vividly remember eating Vincent’s pizza and watching the Lakers with Wilt Chamberlain playing the Knicks. The pie was great, but the basketball results weren’t.
Our friendship ended on a sad note. Vincent had a girlfriend who was a singer/ songwriter and he asked me for help in a lawsuit she was considering for someone she felt had plagiarized her work. I contacted the great Steve Tenebaum who I met working with The Beatles, who better to deal with a music issue?
Steve examined the material and didn’t feel there was enough there to warrant any legal action and furthermore, her song itself seemd to be plagiarized.
I passed on the information to Vincent. He didn’t take it well and I never saw him (or the pizza) again.