Neighborhood of memories: Pizza and pinochle at Gino's

There has to be a medical term for someone who awakens one morning and realizes how much she misses a particular part of her past. Is it melancholia? Homesickness? The “good old days” syndrome? Be that as it may, my “back-to-the-future” experience was the time I learned to play pinochle while tossing pizza.

     In 1956, when I was the quasi-mature age of 15, the Jenovic family opened Gino’s Pizza on Lake Shore Blvd. now the site of a beauty salon across from the Valero gas station. Maybe it would better jog your memory if you knew it was the location of the Hones Grocery Store where Gertrude and Gary Hones and their family were pioneering what would become the present-day supermarket. Just thinking about Gino’s makes me yearn for nickel jukebox tunes and folks hanging out and talking over a pizza with double cheese and pepperoni.

    Most of the pizza patrons were from the local area, including the best place a kid could grow up—Beulah Park, just a stone’s throw from Euclid Beach Park where there are too many memories to tackle just now.

   My family lived in the first house on Lakeside Drive, the one with the big front yard sporting an old, old Hawthorne tree planted by Mrs. Burton, our upstairs neighbor from England. Her husband, Jim, was in maintenance at Euclid Beach, where he put fresh coats of paint on the rides. The kids in the area rarely saw him in anything but paint-stained coveralls.

   When Milan “Potsy” Jenovic opened Gino’s, I lied about my age to get a job. He was a motorcycle cop and all of his leather police issue clothing would crunch when he walked. It was a great sound. He later told me he knew I lied and was just waiting for me to “fess” up. Busted! I needed a work permit and a food-handling permit and couldn’t apply for those unless I was 16. Hence, the fib.

   Donna DeMarco Jenovic, Potsy’s wife, ran the day-to-day operations of the pizza emporium. She would run errands to stock up on cheese, flour and all the good things it takes to make a memorable pizza. While she was gone, I’d feed the German shepherd, fold the laundry and, oh! make pizza or spaghetti, scrub the pans, wipe off the booths and keep the place dusted and swept. I loved it. My pay? 75 cents an hour, a good hourly rate for the time. I brought home $8.25 a week and turned it over to my mom. I kept 75 cents for a school bus pass.

   Shortly after Gino’s opened, a regular group of guys would come in, order a medium pepperoni and share it while playing cards. Among the group were Wendell “Kootch” Kucera, Jim “Ozzie” Glavic, “Smitty” Smith (don’t know if I ever knew his first name), Art Helm from Austria who only ate “shees” pizzas, Ron Guentzler, John Kincaid, Rich Guhde, my brother Paul Brokaw Jr., and Jeff Stewart. They weren’t all regulars, but regular enough to be remembered in my old thoughts of my old days.

   These fellows, two to three years my senior, would sit for hours playing pinochle on cold winter evenings when the wind would cut you in half when you went outside.

  Whenever the cards came out there were usually four loyal players ready to do battle: Kootch, Ozzie, Smitty and Art. When I got nosey enough to ask what they were playing, the answer was “pinochle.”

   Well, that’s the first time I’d heard that word. I could play Canasta, rummy, gin rummy, even crazy eights, but I had never heard of pinochle. The 48-card pack consisted of eight aces, kings, queens, jacks, tens and nines. It took me about 16 hours of watching and listening to catch on to this game called pinochle. Between making pizzas and serving Pepsi, I couldn’t wait to sit down and play a hand. When I did it was a disaster.

   Teen-aged boys, especially your brother’s friends, are not kind or gentle and don’t mince words. I learned the hard way not to renege, play a card out of turn, give my partner a point card, and so on. But learn I did. What those crazed card players taught me makes me eternally grateful they took the time to teach me, even though they could have cleaned up their vocabulary along the way.

   Gino’s was my home away from home for two years. When I graduated from Collinwood High School in January of 1959, other family members were running the pizza shop and I had to get a “real” job.

   But thanks to a bunch of rowdy card-playing combatants, I’ll always smell pepperoni pizza and mozzarella cheese whenever the pinochle cards are dealt.