The line was out the door at Vento’s Pizza in East Liberty on Thursday. The store has been like that since its owner, Albert Vento, announced two weeks ago on Facebook that he will close the shop for good on Saturday after 67 years in business.
The pizza restaurant gained fame locally for becoming the home of Franco’s Italian Army, a passionate fan club for the late Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris. And it was the passing of Harris at age 72 in December that made Vento start to rethink his priorities. Harris had come to the restaurant to eat and sign autographs the day before he passed away.
“I said to myself, ‘Here today, gone tomorrow.’ I’m 66 years old. Almost 67 in a couple more weeks,” he said. “Something's gotta give.”
Vento was born the same year the restaurant opened, but he didn’t receive his first paycheck until he was 17. He took over from his father in the 1980s and said he’s been working six days a week ever since — and that's not counting prep work on Sundays.
The shop has had four locations in East Liberty since 1956, most recently in the Home Depot parking lot on Highland Avenue. But the location that most people who came out on Thursday remember was catty-corner from the old Peabody High School (now Obama 6-12).
Vento remembers watching the Steelers games for years as a kid with his dad and watching the team lose. Harris's "Immaculate Reception" — one of the most famous plays in football history — changed everything, he said.
"Pittsburgh had the gloom and doom. You had the steel mills with the dark clouds coming out of the mills," he said. "Now, the Immaculate Reception happens. Sunlight came in. Steelers Nation was born."
After that, he said, Steelers games were like a party. His father co-founded Franco’s Italian Army at Vento’s, and they would borrow equipment from the local armory as props, even bringing a tank to one game, for which, he said, they had to get a permit.
"It was like going to the game with Goodfellas," he said. "We had 12 seats….Two seats were for food — two seats! So you had 10 crazy Italians and all kinds of food."
On Thursday, the lunch crowd was bigger than expected. Vento’s eldest daughter took off from her day job as a teacher at a Catholic school so she could help out. But so many people showed up that the restaurant locked its doors early because they’d run out of food.
“I didn’t expect this magnitude,” Vento told three elderly women who came by to congratulate him on his retirement. ”People haven't been around here for ten years. All of a sudden they want to come and get a last slice. Where were you the last ten years?”
Vento plans to spend his retirement with his grandchildren and golfing, he said.
Memories
Ray Sudik drove a couple hours from State College with his wife on Thursday to visit the restaurant and eat the “best Italian hoagie in the ‘Burg” one last time. Sudik worked as a sandwich cook at Vento’s from 1973 to 1975, back when Harris and some Pittsburgh Pirates players would come by regularly, as well as a long line of students from Peabody.
“It was like a family,” Sudik said. “Big Al treated you like his son.”
Harold Washington moved away from Pittsburgh in 1985 but said he always made a point to visit Vento’s when he came back into town because it reminded him of his childhood: watching “Big Al” Vento wiping the tables and shaking hands, a group of old Italian men chatting in the corner. He came on Thursday for “The Last Supper” and one last chance to catch a glimpse of someone he might know.
Lamar Williams, 52, said he’s been coming to the store since he was 5, when his mom would order an Italian Army Hoagie nearly every day. Vento watched him grow up, from the days he used to cut school to come eat and Vento greeted him by name one last time on Thursday. Thursday was Williams’ last chance to eat Vento’s because he was leaving for a trip on Friday.
Diamond Davis, 28, said she’s been going to the shop for more than 20 years, back when she had to scrounge up a few coins to be able to buy a slice of pepperoni. Now the workers know her order (four slices of pepperoni and a Mountain Dew). She said she cried when she heard it was closing because it felt like the end of an era.
“East Liberty has changed so much over the years but people always come back to Vento’s,” she said. “I grew up on Penn and Negley, and they knocked those down … and this is the last thing that made East Liberty, East Liberty.”
