Anthony Buccino: Pizza for Dinner is a (Relatively) New Thing

BY  |  Wednesday, Sep 07, 2011 11:00am  |  COMMENTS (12)

A long, long time ago, in the place where you live now, the children and most families who lived here knew the traditional pizza pie as a rare and luxurious treat. Dad arriving home with a hot pizza pie to surprise the family was like setting up a Christmas tree in your living room in July.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many families had one working parent and most moms stayed home to take care of the house and raise their family. We called them housewives because most often in those days, the men went to work and the women did the housekeeping chores.

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Anthony Buccino: Biking on a Dead End Street

BY  |  Monday, Jun 27, 2011 4:00pm  |  COMMENTS (1)

You wouldn’t think that a kid could get into too much trouble riding his bike up and down a dead end street.

On both sides of that Gless Avenue in Belleville there were about a dozen two-family houses and not all of them had kids who rode their bikes in the street, on sidewalks that lifted near big trees, or up and down smooth and bumpy driveways.

In baseball season, we took the cards of players we didn’t know and used a few of mom’s clothespins to make our bikes sound like motorcycles. We always had to see who could put the most cards on the fender, how much noise you could make and how long they would stay on when you raced up and down those driveways.

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Brookdale Soda: Tchotchkes for Sale

BY  |  Thursday, Sep 02, 2010 12:00pm  |  COMMENTS (13)

Two fellows with a strong taste for those favorite flavors of Brookdale soda that sweetened much of New Jersey life from post-World War II to the late 1980s, are on a mission to bring back the soda pop brand of those great old days.

Bobby Cole and Kevin Calhoun, in association with Brookdale Beverage heir Joseph Pieretti, are reviving the logo of the infamous drink and emblazoning it across t-shirts, mousepads, refrigerator magnets, clocks and sweatshirts. Cole, aka Bobby Restaino, was proprietor of the Soda Pop Shop on Bloomfield Ave. in Montclair. Cole is Restaino’s stage name.

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Featured Comment

Perhaps yesterday's heavy police presence would have been better applied to Mission Street than to the Montclair State campus.

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