My father turned 75 on February 10 and we made a three-day weekend of it, one for the ages: an intimate birthday dinner party with family and a few of my parents’ couple friends; a dudes-only overnight to Cleveland for dive bars, dinner and gambling; a Super Bowl family pizza party at Mom and Dad’s to cap it off. Leading up to Sunday’s pickup of the instantly-etched-in-lore pizza – the most dramatically orchestrated and hotly contested piece of the birthday planning – the weekend had progressed flawlessly, miracle after tiny miracle of executed logistics and emotions kept in check. No one was late, no one made a scene, no one shed tears – at least, not the bad kind. But I came close with the pizza.

Travis flew in from Boise for the weekend, and early on in the birthday planning he, Joelle and I pivoted to our shared sibling memories, and the result was a full-on nostalgia fest of feasting: Parasson’s pasta trays, garlic bread and salad dressing to start the weekend, Rocco’s sheet pizzas on Super Bowl Sunday to end it. And because we did not already have enough food in sheet form, Mom turned back the clock, too and made a Texas Sheet Cake, a Dryden popular favorite also known as the Twenty-Four Hour Cake, a nod to its average lifespan on the kitchen counter before someone swooped up the last sad corner piece.

If you were raised in Cuyahoga Falls, chances are you’ve had a few (or a few hundred) slices of Rocco’s pizza. After opening their first shop in 1953 on West Thorton Street in Akron, the family-owned Rocco’s expanded to Cuyahoga Falls in 1962 with the Portage Trail location, within walking distance of our childhood home on 14th Street. You can order a regular round pizza like anywhere else, but to truly experience Rocco’s, to soak up all of its gooey, greasy goodness, you need to go for the 18” x 24” sheet – line up a dozen of these glistening beauties in the back yard and you’d have one hell of a Slip ’n’ Slide. The blasphemous among us pat their servings with a napkin or paper towel to soak up the grease before consuming, which to me reads something like vaping nicotine instead of smoking cigarettes because it’s ostensibly healthier. Growing up, the Rocco’s sheet pizza was ubiquitous at birthday parties, team picnics and church potlucks, the MVP of every banquet table it graced. There are other pizza parlors and other sheet pizzas, but there’s only one Rocco’s, and the bright red logo on the long, white rectangular box – not unlike the Super Bowl insignia on the 50-yard line – is a local trademark of quality.

Our family didn’t always order Rocco’s, but when we did, it usually marked a special occasion. At some point Rocco’s slid into our annual holiday traditions, gobbled in front of the TV while we watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation before getting gussied up for God and the Christmas Eve candlelight service. Before Travis and I locked the 14th Street doors for the final time after helping Mom and Dad move out in 2018, we stood in the kitchen of our youth chasing beers (and a few tears) with room-temperature slices of leftover Rocco’s. With both of us living hundreds or thousands of miles away from Portage Trail for most of our adult lives, Rocco’s became a bucket list item for return trips, and Travis, Joelle and I agreed it would be the perfect centerpiece for a capital-S Super Bowl party that was to serve as the exclamation point, the fourth-quarter spike in the end zone, on Dad’s birthday weekend.

But we nearly got stiff-armed. Mom, whose initial response to our plan was she “could do better than pizza,” was hellbent on serving burgers and hot dogs. Sloppy joes also were pitched as a better-than-pizza alternative. Like a Tom Brady football, the exclamation point was deflating right before game time. A flurry of texts, across multiple threads and multiple days, followed. There were side conversations, direct discussions and indirect asides, and we came at Mom with a full-on, three-headed emotional blitz: “It’s what the kids want,” Travis texted; “The kids are always right,” I added. Yes, we are grown-ass adults between the ages of 45 and 54, and yes, we played that card. On day three of the great pizza debate, we got our way. 

But the matter was far from settled. Next, we had to decide on toppings to satisfy a variety of diets and taste buds; then the last but certainly not least important decision, how many pizzas to order. Answering a subjective question of such import is no easy task. There are appetites, economics and philosophies to consider – colored, as with any big decision among our extended family, by an unshakable Midwestern sensibility that means something different to each of us. We had 10 people to feed: seven adults and three teenagers, including one football-playing, shot-put-throwing 17 year old who could out-eat any of the adults. Travis and I were firmly in the three pizzas camp. Joelle was adamant that two would suffice, and Mom backed her up. The crux of my argument – my philosophical stance, as it were, sharpened by decades of personal pizza party experience  – was that leftover pizza is always better than not enough pizza. Joelle countered my feelings with facts, pointing out that one Rocco’s sheet pizza equals 30 slices, and opined, “90 pieces of pizza is a lot.” Yes, yes it is – you say that like it’s a bad thing, Joelle. I mentioned that I might order an emergency pizza on my own dime. Ultimately, I resorted to swearing. As the youngest sibling, I learned long ago that sometimes I have to be the loudest to be heard, and in this matter at least, Travis turned up his dial not to drown me out but to back me up. The strategy worked. Three pizzas it would be.

Every family history has a few good “dumb shit” stories, when something happens that’s so dumb it crosses the threshold of stupidity into the absurd, and once it’s over the only thing left to do is laugh about it and file it away as another dumb shit story to be told and retold in the years to come. And when it came time to pick up our three sheet pizzas, shit got dumb. Even though the Graham Road Rocco’s is closer to my parents’ house in Stow, Travis and I, in the interest of nostalgia, insisted on ordering from the Portage Trail location. It was a brotherly excuse to drive through the Falls and creep past our old house on 14th Street – to stare at the increasingly unfamiliar familiarity of the place we grew up – but more importantly, Pac-Man beckoned. When we were kids, the Portage Trail Rocco’s had some of those old-school sit-down arcade tables in the dining room, and Travis had a hankering to revisit this slice of his youth. We left early to bake in time for a few quarters, but when we got there we found that Pac-Man and the rest of the arcade tables were gone, relegated to ghosts of our past along with PJ’s ice cream stand and State Road Shopping Center. We never thought to jump in the long line and check on the pizzas; instead, we hit up Google to find the closest place to slam a quick beer and get back to Rocco’s for our pickup time without anyone, up to and including our mother, wondering where we were, what we were up to and why the hell it was taking so long.

Turns out we could have stayed at the bar for a second beer. When we got back to Rocco’s and gave them our name, confusion ensued. Our three sheet pizzas were missing. They weren’t on the pickup shelf, and they weren’t in the oven. Rocco, the ringleader of the Portage Trail location and grandson of the original Rocco, called Graham Road to confirm that Mom had not placed the order there. Then, after a quick review of the order tickets, Rocco realized our pizzas had already left the building, personally carried out to the car of a customer named Craig Brubeck. Rocco asked us, with a hopeful timbre, if we knew Craig. We did not, though Travis mentioned something about Dave, the legendary jazz pianist, further confounding the crew behind the counter. Rocco rummaged through the order tickets again, pulled one from the stack and dialed up the number on Craig’s ticket. A woman answered and confirmed that yes, Craig Brubeck and company were in possession of three sheet pizzas, but their half-sausage, half-pepperoni was missing – which of course it was, because the pizzas in their possession, our pizzas, did not include said combo. Rocco apologized to us and bumped our redo order to the front of the line. We took a seat on a bench to wait out the 15 minutes sans entertainment or elixirs, and texted the family to fill them in on the saga. At least now we were guaranteed to get fresh, piping-hot Rocco’s pizza right out of the oven, which is the best way to enjoy it (room temperature being a close second). When our order was up, we wished Rocco well and carried the pizzas out ourselves, cursing Craig Brubeck’s good name.

We got back to Stow just in time to catch Chris Stapleton and his beard perform “The Star-Spangled Banner.” My parents are Stapleton fans, to the extent they asked if I could leverage my music industry connections to score them free tickets to his most recent Cleveland show. My mother noted her enjoyment of his singing voice with a sidebar objecting to his physical appearance. Such are the typical Boomer standards for quality entertainment in a western world largely under the spell of a bearded, longhaired man-god. Mom’s insights reminded me of the time I rang up a Lady Gaga CD for a senior woman the Monday after Super Bowl LI, and while fumbling through her purse to pay she gushed about Gaga’s vocal talents, then concluded her halftime show review with a lament about Gaga’s lifestyle choices. Boomers, particularly right-leaning Boomers, are peculiar, contradictory pop culture consumers who often fixate on aesthetics and bedroom behavior. Raise your objections to the socio-political views of an Eric Clapton or Ted Nugent and they can’t see why you won’t just relax and enjoy the music; then a man shows up to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl looking like Chewbacca on a blind date, or they learn that a woman with a stunning singing voice is slathered with tattoos and sometimes has sex with women, and the hand-wringing begins.

None of which has anything to do with the three sheet pizzas Travis and I triumphantly placed on the island in my parents’ kitchen, though in hindsight it might have helped to have Stapleton and his ample carriage at the party to help us work our way through 90 pieces. Then again, Stapleton would have cut into our allotment of the leftovers, which was half the point of lobbying for three sheet pizzas versus two. There are few things worse than running out of pizza, and hey, if there’s some left over at the end of the night then everybody wins. Even the thought of some imaginary future scenario where we run out of pizza triggers an emotion that fits snugly within a Venn diagram of panic and anger. Joelle was right about it being a lot of pizza, but too much pizza? In this context, it’s not about being right, because there’s never been a moment in human history when too much pizza was wrong. Four days later, standing alone in my kitchen, the last sad corner piece tasted like gooey, greasy victory.

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