REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK
By John Tredrea
The biggest turning point in the lives of many children may be the day they are allowed to begin crossing the street on their own. Ah. The glory days are over then, Mom and Dad. Now they belong to the rest of the world, too. They won’t be all yours anymore. You’re going to have to share them.
A big question, always: what’s on the other side of the street that they now are able to cross on their own? For many hundreds of kids around here, the answer has been a great one any way you look at it. The answer was Vito’s Pizza.
Vito’s has been here a long time since the late 1980s. It’s just moved next door to itself, from 4 N. Main St. to 2 N. Main St.
This is a good time to say that I know for a fact that many, many people in the Pennington area are extremely grateful for what this business has done for our families.
When children are in Vito’s, you know they are safe and they’re having a great time and having something good to eat. For parents, this already is Seventh Heaven. But there’s more, a lot more. Personally, I feel very emotional when I say the men and women who have worked at Vito’s and many of them have been there for a very long time, well over a decade have done so much for the children around here. Yes, they gave them a safe, clean, fun place where they could eat and drink good things. But they also gave themselves, freely and continually, and the self they gave was a great role model. They became friends, good and true friends, with the children who came in, and they had the uncanny gift of getting on an equal footing with them and mentoring them at the same time. They helped them do good things and helped them avoid mischief, trouble and pointless frustration. They gave them jobs, good jobs.
Our children wanted to look good in the eyes of those people because they loved and respected them Vito himself, his father Nat, mother Marie, sister Marie and employees like Pat (that’s what everybody calls him. His full name is Pasquale DeStasio). Among many other Vito employees, there was Dave Stout, who worked there for a long time before moving to Pennington Public Works a few years ago. (Jeff Wittkop, public works supervisor, sometimes calls Dave Stout "Pizza Dave.")
For a long time, our oldest boy’s most priceless possession was his Pittsburgh Steelers jacket. Why was he such an ardent Steelers fan? Because Dave Stout was (and is).
To earn and keep the respect and friendship of guys like Vito and Pat and Dave, children around here did many good things. They knew that having the respect and friendship of guys like that was one of life’s greatest pleasures and treasures. It was good and it was cool, and we all know it doesn’t get any better than that. It’s like this: if Pat thinks you are a good guy and a cool guy, peer pressure has ceased to be a big issue. The respect and friendship of a man like that is a rock a kid can anything on. It can do a lot to help keep a kid going right. You don’t want Pat to be disappointed in you. It’s that simple.
In my house, my wife and I look at the guys who work as Vito’s as brothers. The reason why is very simple. They were like uncles, true and good uncles (Godfathers even!) to both our sons. They gave them good food, had fun with them, and took real good care of them. They showed them how to be. Someone once said something along the lines of children often not obeying your words but never failing to follow your example. I think there’s a lot of truth in that.
When Vito’s moved into 4 N. Main St. nearly 20 years ago, we lived directly across the street, with what were then two little kids. We’ve moved twice since, but have always lived within a block and a half of Vito’s. When they were able to cross the street themselves, you know where our guys wanted to go first and foremost. They and their friends have spent countless hours there.
I’ll tell you how much our sons love Vito’s. One day long ago, back when being able to cross the street on one’s own was a highly emergent issue in our house, my wife and I asked them how they felt about moving to Hopewell Township. They’d be in the same school system, we assured them. We figured they’d love the idea, because they were always running around whatever woods or open fields they could get to.
I’ll never forget the stunned, breathless reaction of righteously indignant shock. They were adamantly against moving because then they wouldn’t "be able to walk to Vito’s anymore." Talk about a deal breaker. They seemed to regard the mere idea of moving away from Vito’s as a sin certainly a significant moral error of some kind. I think they were genuinely "disappointed in us," in a way that felt almost parental, for suggesting "leaving Vito’s." So there we stayed and here we are.
There’s been local talk for years about giving our kids "more places to go." I know I had a lot more choices than these kids do. In the North Jersey town of 8,000 I spent half my childhood in, kids could walk or bike on their own to a movie theater, bowling alley and, it seems like, dozens of places that had juke boxes in them. You could have something to eat and drink and maybe ask a beautiful girl to dance. She might say yes, who knows. Then you could dance, between the booths and the counter. This stuff actually happened, every day. How could such great places fade away the way they have? Oh, well.
You could still swim in the lakes and rivers then. You had to buy a badge from the town to be able to do it. The cost of the badge: 50 cents for the summer. The movie was 35 cents. Bowling was 15 cents a game weekday afternoons. If you had a paper route or some other kind of little job, you could live like a king. And there were woods and fields all over the place, fishing everywhere you turned around. Oh, we had plenty to do.
But I digress. The kids here can’t walk to a theatre or a bowling alley and they sure can’t swim all summer for 50 cents or do the stroll at jukejoints. They could use some more opportunities, I think. But Vito’s has given them a great place to go for a long time. Vito’s hasn’t been just for kids, far from it. But it’s a great asset to have such a boundlessly positive force for youth in a flawed world where sooner or later, they’re going to be able to cross the street on their own.

