Pizza

1970’s and 80’s Longmont, the town I grew up in, wasn’t exactly a hotbed of culinary delights – especially when it came to delivery – so if fast food was on the menu (pretty rare), the family went to the restaurant.

Burger Chef, the 29 cent Hamburger Stand, and A&W if my dad was feeling generous were the typical eat-out destinations growing up.

Eventually 1986 rolled around and I headed off to Navy bootcamp, and a couple of months later ended up at the submarine base in Groton Connecticut. This is where I got my first real experience with delivery pizza.

See, living in the barracks on base without a car, in the 80’s, meant you had four basic food options:

1. The Cross Hall galley on base – which was just up the road from the barracks (about a quarter mile) and was pretty good, but also tended to be a zoo during chow hours which were 2-hour windows at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You also had to pay to eat there and it wasn’t cheap.
2. A couple of really sketchy fast food joints at the Dealey Center on the other side of the base
3. The hot food vending machines in the common area of the barracks
4. Dominos pizza

Let’s give you a map to visualize this:

The red dot in the main gate – how you escaped the base once you were allowed to. The green dot was the barracks I lived in, the blue dot was the chow hall, and the yellow dot over by the piers was the sketchy fast food joints.

Option 1 was generally right out – unless it was a holiday… It took too long and I was too damn tired to stand in line for a half an hour to eat.

Option 2 was also right out. If I was too tired to stand in a line 200 yards from my bed, marching my ass across the base for something that only resembled a hamburger was also right out.

Option 3 was my usual dinner as one of the vending machines had $0.50 cans of hot soup. The vending machines by the way looked like this:

Option 4 was my weekend treat. Dominos was really the only pizza place in Groton that could deliver to the base, so it was always Dominos on Friday night. We ordered from a payphone in the common area and 20-ish minutes later food for the entire weekend would arrive.

This is where I developed my favorite pizza: pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, onions, and extra cheese… And this is the pizza I order every time I order a pizza – since 1986.

Granted, I don’t order pizza all that often, and when I do it’s usually Marco’s or Beau Jo’s – which are fancy coal-fired Neapolitan pizza or Colorado’s famous “pizza by the pound”.

Well, tonight I was feeling like turning the knob on my wayback machine and ordered my 1986 usual from Dominos.

And the two slices I managed to eat before I was stuffed were really good!

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