Life-Changing Pizza

Madeline Northup

On Dixie Highway in Hamilton, just near the start of Fairfield, lies the unassuming, but incredibly delicious, Chester’s Pizza. Outside, the restaurant boasts a large front porch where diners can eat during the warmer months. Now, though, as winter rages on in Ohio, the porch lies bare save for a few Christmas decorations. As I stepped onto the porch and opened the glass door, the real surprise, guaranteed for all customers, wafted into my nose: the warm, garlicky smell of baking pizza.

With its Italian flag décor and framed photographs of family members past and present, the restaurant stands as a true testament to hard work and devotion. First started on a smaller scale in Chester and Mary Dadabo’s home in 1947, the pizza business later flourished in a time when American GI’s serving in World War II were looking for war memories and tastes of the land they had fought in while overseas.

Chester himself, formerly Cesare Dadabo, immigrated to the United States from St. Bari, Italy, in 1919 at just fourteen years old. Upon arrival, Chester went through processing at Ellis Island, which included quarantining for diseases, vetting, and basic English language lessons. Upon completion of processing, Chester was accepted into the United States as a new member of society. Leaving New York, Chester settled in West Virginia, where he worked as a coal miner for a while. Tired of the prejudice that many Italians faced living in Appalachia during that time, he packed up his belongings and headed for Hamilton, Ohio, where he met his future wife, Mary. Mary herself had emigrated from Italy around 1910-11 and settled in Hamilton with her family.

After they married, Chester bought a house with a grocery store on the property, where he and his wife sold meats, canned goods, and Italian delicacies on a small scale. Named Chester’s Grocery Market Store, a second branch was opened after Chester saw tremendous success with the original store. Meanwhile, as their business flourished, Mary, a skilled baker and chef, decided to start making pizzas for her husband and their children. Originally a daughter of the Milillo family, a family known for their pizza in Hamilton as well, Mary created pizzas in her kitchen at home, which quickly caught the eye, or rather nose, of people as they passed by. By word of mouth, Mary’s skill of pizza making spread, and with increasing encouragement by patrons of the grocery store, she and Chester decided to prebake pizzas, wrap them in cellophane, and sell them frozen to customers in their stores. This very well might have been the first frozen pizza, especially in Hamilton, whose residents were relatively unfamiliar with the obscure, but rapidly growing product at the time.

As time went on and their homemade frozen pizzas became more and more popular, Chester and Mary also saw a decline in their grocery stores. With big chains like Kroger moving into the area, there wasn’t as much of a need for mom-and-pop stores. Knowing that their pizza was different, though, an original Italian recipe that would never change through each generation, they decided to create what Hamiltonians now know as Chester’s Pizza.

Founded in April of 1954, Chester’s Pizza is now run by third-generation family member, Chuck Vitale. At just five or six years old, Mr. Vitale began helping out in the family grocery store however he could. Then, at ten years old, he officially joined the pizza business, rolling dough in the kitchen in order to be closer to his dad, who had followed in the footsteps of his own father. That first taste of family tradition soon turned into a job for him when he started receiving a small salary in junior high. So small, in fact, that it was under the minimum wage at the time. “I didn’t care, though,” Mr. Vitale said during our interview, “It was the best $33.42 I ever cleared.”

The rest might have been history, if Mr. Vitale hadn’t veered from his track in the family business to earn a degree in Criminal Justice. Serving as a probation officer in law enforcement for many years, Mr. Vitale saw it as a secondary job, one that could not match up to the work he did at Chester’s Pizza, no matter how hard that work really was.

Now, Mr. Vitale is recognized all over the nation for his continuation of the family business, and his loyalty to all the original recipes that people have grown to love. As Mr. Vitale, surrounded by the history of a talented and hard-working family, said to me as we wrapped up our interview, “If you want to do something like this, be prepared to have your life changed.”