Every city likes to boast it has the best pizza in
America. I used to think my hometown Fisher’s pizza was pretty
good. The restaurant specialized in St. Louis-style pizza with
a super-thin yeast-less crust smothered in Provel
cheese. (Provel, for the uninitiated, is a mixture of provolone,
Swiss, and white cheddar peculiar to St. Louis.)
Fisher’s is still making pies, but the quality went
downhill back in the 1980s, along with family farms, the Soviet
Union and Bob Dylan’s career.
Naturally, my girlfriend had her own idea about where to
find America’s best pizza, so we pointed the truck north and
headed toward her hometown of Jacksonville, Illinois, where
there’s this little Italian joint just off the square called
Leo’s Pizza.
Leo’s serves more than pizza — there’s a very nice ravioli
with artichoke and spinach dish — but ordering anything else
would be like visiting Chartres Cathedral for the
great parking.
You come for the Sicilian stuffed pizza.
Describing Leo’s stuffed pizza is about as futile as
describing Chartres Cathedral; it really must be
experienced first hand. I can tell you, however, that what sets
Leo’s apart is the homemade sauce and the homemade dough which
they roll themselves. It is not uncommon for former residents to
road trip from as far away as Kansas City and Indianapolis for
Leo’s. Happily, our drive took only two hours.
Jacksonville, it should be noted, is more than Leo’s Pizza.
It is a seriously bookish town with two private colleges
(Illinois College and MacMurray College) and the Illinois School
for the Deaf. A good many of the residents move here for the
latter institution, and Jacksonville’s second language isn’t
Spanish, but American Sign. Across town, there is a school for
the blind, as well as the public and Catholic high schools; on
just about every corner there is a school of some sort. With all
those bookish people, it’s no wonder the city has two major book
binderies: Bound to Stay Bound Books and Perma Bound Books. For
non-readers, there is the Ferris Wheel factory, whose products
are as ubiquitous as the schools, and makes for an interesting
dichotomy.
AS FORTUNE would have it, we visited Jacksonville the
weekend of the Fifteenth Annual Grierson Days.
Jacksonville has many favorite sons, but the most
noteworthy are General Benjamin H. Grierson and Ken
Norton.
Norton twice held the North American Boxing
Federation Heavyweight Championship title in
the1970s — once after he defeated Mohammed Ali. This was Ali in
his prime, mind you. And Norton didn’t just beat Ali, he broke
his jaw.
There is a street named after Norton here, though it
appears to be a not very prominent thoroughfare. In some of the
taverns off the square you can find faded, flyspecked photographs
of various proprietors posing with the former champ.
As for Gen. Grierson, he has quite a following still. Every
year the Grierson Society puts on a reenactment of
Grierson’s Raid. The reenactment is held at the city park,
which for one day is turned into a mock Civil War battlefield
complete with cannon, horses, white tents, banjo pickers, and, on
the bandstand, Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln impersonators. One
toothless, bearded fellow, sweating in his Union Calvary garb (it
was 100 degrees in the shade), buttonholed us and commenced a
long, garbled tale about his being drummed out of the corps on
account of being caught “sleeping naked with his tent-flap open.”
Sadly, this was not part of the reenactment.
Grierson was a music teacher, who nursed a lifelong grudge
against horses after being kicked in the head as a child.
Nevertheless, he was saddled with the job of leading a cavalry
brigade 600 miles from Tennessee to Baton Rouge. Along the way,
he destroyed everything in his path, before meeting up with
Sherman for the Battle
of Snyder’s Bluff.
Grierson’s Raid was actually a diversion, but one that
allowed Grant to land unopposed on the east side of the
Mississippi and take Richmond. The Battle of
Gettysburg gets most of the credit for turning the tide of the
Civil War, but the almost simultaneous surrender of Vicksburg,
Miss., on July 4, 1963, was the one-two punch that signaled the
Confederacy’s doom.
We didn’t stick around to watch the actual reenactment —
so I can’t tell you how one reenacts a diversionary tactic —
because we were getting hungry and we still had some leftover
Leo’s pizza in the fridge.
Leo’s, by the way, sells half-baked pizzas. You can eat
your fill and order another to go. At home you pop the pie into
the oven, let it bake a half-hour, get out the napkins and
plates, and it’s just like being back at one of the tables at
Leo’s Pizza in Jacksonville — which we intend to be, every
chance we get.
