Arriving

I have fond memories of Mineo’s Pizza in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. Everyone went there. If you grew up in that neighborhood in the late sixties and early seventies, Mineo’s is where memories were made.My father would buy it for me. He never ate a slice himself. I never saw him eat pizza, or McDonald’s, or anything like that. As the son of a kosher butcher from Poland he liked beef. To my father, a meal was not a meal without meat. The pizza was for me. He bought it because I loved it.He also bought me clothes from London Dock, a high-end store on Forbes Avenue in the heart of Squirrel Hill. It was where the cool kids shopped. We couldn’t really afford it. He bought it anyway.My father worked as the maître d' at the Concordia Club, a private Jewish club where some of the wealthiest families in Pittsburgh were members. He knew that world — not as someone who belonged to it, but as someone who served it, every night, for 30 years. He knew its rooms, its rhythms, what…