And it all started in Ames:
History
The Pagliai’s Pizza story did not start in Iowa City. Some might say it began in Florence, Italy.
Armond Pagliai Sr.’s parents, John and Catherine Pagliai, moved from Florence to Iowa in 1914. They settled in the now non-existent coal mining town of Zookspur, near Madrid. The couple brought their pizza recipe with them. Armond Pagliai Sr. remembers his father killing meat and preparing sausage and his mother making her own bread and dough.
During the 1950s, his brother, Salvatore “Sam” Pagliai, was running a bar, The Sportsman’s Lounge, in Ames.
“It was strictly a bar,” he said. “There was a little restaurant next door, Tom’s Grill and he had pizza in there. A lot of people would go next door, buy a pizza and bring it over to the bar. And at first it was fine. But (Sam) started to pick up two or three boxes, then he started picking up 35, 40 boxes. So what he did, he went and bought a pizza oven and he put it in the backroom and set up a little kitchen back there and started serving pizza. And it went over pretty good.”
After awhile, Sam Pagliai tired of the bar business and in 1957 opened a pizza restaurant in the Dogtown neighborhood, across from the Friley (Residence) Hall on the Iowa State University campus.
“On Sunday nights when the dorm wouldn’t feed over there, in the boys’ dorm (cafeteria),” he said. “We’d go in there about 2:30 p.m., 3 p.m. and we’d make about 75 12-inch pizzas and about that many large ones and stack them up on the ovens. We’d open up at 4 o’clock and at about 5, 5:30 p.m. we were still running an hour, hour-and-a-half behind trying to catch up. It was crazy.”
At the time, Armond Pagliai Sr. was working for John Deere in Ankeny and would drive to Ames on the weekends to help his brother with the business.
“(Sam would) always try to talk me into quitting John Deere and going to work for him,” he said. “It seemed like they were always going out on strike at John Deere, two, three times a year. So I went in and gave them a couple weeks notice and told them I was going to quit and was going to work with him and that’s how I got started.”
From there, the brothers began opening Pagliai’s locations in other college towns. The second restaurant was in Lincoln, Neb., which Armond Pagliai Sr. started before moving on to Iowa City.
“I’d take somebody in here, young, somebody that wanted to go into business. I’d keep them here a year or two and train them. And then we would set one up,” he said. “We’d let him manage it for a year and then we sold it to him.”
Of the 30 locations that were opened, about a dozen remain, in towns such as Johnston; Grinnell; Mankato, Minn.; Carbondale, Ill.; Murray, Ky.; and Bowling Green, Ohio.
“Some of them that worked hard made it and the ones who wanted to get out and play, didn’t make it,” he said. “You gotta be there.”
They stopped opening new restaurants roughly 30 years ago, making a rare exception for an entrepreneur in Kentucky 15 years ago.
After Armond Pagliai Sr. moved to Iowa City, he and his wife started a family and decided not to move again.
http://www.corridorbusiness.com/news/pagliai’s-still-kneading-dough/
