Feature article
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Good schools brought pizza to the Atomic City
By Fred Sauceman
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David Neusel, son of Big Ed, preserves a legacy of pizza making that traveled from Detroit to Huntsville, Alabama, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. (Fred Sauceman photo).
Big Ed’s Pizza
LOCATION: 101 Broadway Avenue
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
PHONE: 865-482-4885 |
Pizza in Huntsville, Alabama, in the early 1960s consisted of biscuit dough, catsup and cheap cheese, claims David Neusel. His father, Ed, changed all that, with a handshake-deal pizza recipe from Dino’s in Detroit.
“Big Ed” had a ninth-grade education, but his son says, “He was one of the smartest people I’ll ever meet. Book-learned? No. But he had more common sense than the law allows, and his education came the hard way.”
That education came through the grimy hands of a race car mechanic and lonely nights working on the Penn Central Railroad. It came with Japanese gunfire in Okinawa where Ed served with the First Marine Division in World War II. His was the broken-nosed education of semi-pro football in Michigan, the dirty fingernails learning of a landscaper.
When the Neusel family moved to Huntsville and started selling pizza, the city was saturated with Ph.D.s, at the height of the U.S. space program. But Ed was never intimidated by education. He respected it and insisted that his children embrace it. The Marine marksman demanded physical discipline, too, and enrolled his boys in the Rocket City Aquatic Club. There Ed met the late Bill Lewis, then the swimming and track coach at Oak Ridge High School in Tennessee.
Bill talked up the quality of the educational system in Tennessee’s Atomic City — how the high concentration of technical people had a direct bearing on the level of mathematics and science education in the public schools, just as it did in the rigorous schools of engineer-rich Huntsville. (David would go on to earn an engineering degree from the University of Tennessee.)
In February of 1970, Big Ed’s Pizza opened on Jackson Square in Oak Ridge. “Good schools brought us here,” David says.
In his dark beer hall of a building with oiled oak floors, Big Ed made a living selling pizzas, but he was always, beyond anything else, a Marine. In the back of the restaurant, there’s a sign-in book, for Marines only. Big Ed was a wide hulk of a man whose dark visage masked a tender inside.
“You’ll never know how many people he touched,” says David. “One of his favorite sayings, after he had done someone a favor, was ‘Don’t tell anybody.’ He grew up in the Depression and knew the importance of helping people get a step up and help themselves.”
Big Ed’s Pizza has provided first jobs for hundreds of Oak Ridge High School students, along with lessons about cleanliness, punctuality and getting along with people.
Look at the photographs and caricatures of Big Ed on the walls and windows of the restaurant and you understand that serving salads would never have seemed right there. Big Ed’s sells pizza, period. No sides. No sandwiches. The menu’s about the size of a pocket football schedule, and the only choices are the size of the pizza, the toppings and the beverage.
“Everything here is made from scratch, by our own recipes,” says David. “We do our own hamburger. We use Canadian bacon because it’s lean. Our cheese is whole-milk from Wisconsin. We make our own dough. We mix the spices for our sauce that is made with Italian pear tomatoes.
“The closest to our style of pizza is what you find in northwest Italy, along the French border, where they have brick-fired ovens.”
Big Ed held court at one of the restaurant’s six-sided Italian marble counters. They were U-Hauled south from a bar in Detroit.
“You’d swear he would be asleep, with his head on his hand, and then you’d hear a grunt and see his finger pointing at you when you’d done something wrong,” David recalls. “When people would walk in the door, he could get a read on them.”
Even in security-obsessed Oak Ridge, some customers dared to walk out of Big Ed’s without paying. Big Ed would follow them out to the parking lot, calmly escort them back into the building, and kindly demand payment.
“Within six months of his passing (Big Ed died in 1998), a gentleman came in here with his daughter, who was in the middle of a nasty divorce,” David remembers. “He came up to me and said he could have sworn that my dad was standing over us, looking down, with his arms crossed, shaking his head.
“Dad’s still here. He watches over the place. Other people have thought they saw him, too.”
In summer, customers at Big Ed’s bring in fresh vegetables straight out of their gardens and send them back to the kitchen for use as pizza toppings. David says the most unusual carry-in toppings were corned beef and cabbage, with potato soup as a white sauce.
“But I follow what my dad taught me, to taste the cheese, the sauce and the bread, above and beyond everything,” David says. “And to make sure they are in balance and correct. I don’t tend to do a lot of things that overpower the flavors of those items, because that’s the basis for your pizza. I won’t know if I’ve done it right until I can talk to my dad again.”
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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