Just as a touchpoint, I have the WPA Guide to New York City from 1939. Some foods that required descriptions included shish kebab, pilaf, bouillabaisse, ravioli, minestrone, veal scallopini, tortilla, taco, and smorgasbord. Obviously, these were served in ethnic restaurants from much earlier, but they were so unknown to most Americans that they had to be explained.
Growing up, there was no fast food within a half-hour’s drive and no Chinese at all. One restaurant served pizza; my introduction to it was the Chef Boyardee kits (with parmesan cheese).
I only mention the late seventies because I have no firsthand experience of Rochester earlier.
Betcha dollars to donuts (or pizzas) that Rochester was filled with pizza places in the 1960s.
Here’s a sampling of pages from the Democrat and Chronicle. I typed in the date range “1950-1970” and the subject “pizza”. Pizza is pretty clearly seen as a common, everyday item from 1957 onwards:
Granted, there are a lot of ads for make-it-yourself pizzas, but what do you expect from an ad-laden newspaper? There are also lots of articles that take pizza-eating for granted.
And look at the frequency chart in the upper left – from the late 50s onward “pizza” is pretty common in the paper.
“Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree” was a massive hit in the 70’s. Tying a yellow ribbon to a fence had about as much to do with wearing a yellow ribbon as hanging a mitten on a fence has to do with wearing mittens
My Grandfather (Illinois native) first saw a pizza in pre-war Italy: he didn’t speak the language, but he was still fairly young and adventurous, so he just pointed at what he wanted. As a child in Arizona in the 60’s, the closest thing I saw to a pizza was a melted/baked cheese taco.
Since we left the 'states in 68, bean casserole was never part of our Thanksgiving.
We went to Mankato once a year to get our eyes checked (everyone wears glasses), and Mom had us all signed up for the McDonald’s birthday club - so everyone got a free burger, fries and a drink (possibly a shake, it was a long time ago).
Otherwise, you only ate out when you turned 16: you got to pick a fancy restaurant (or what passed for it in rural SW Minnesota) and got to eat dinner with just mom and dad - the siblings stayed home.
It’s fiction, but in the extended version of The Godfather, Fabrizio (a bodyguard to Michael Corleone in Sicily who plants a car bomb that kills Apollonia, Michael’s first wife) is shown in 1958 operating a pizza parlor in Buffalo in 1958.
“…and this weekend, a succulent leg of lamb for your Easter roast.”
That’s not a thing! OK, springtime, a country with a lot of sheep: yes, eat lamb. Rosemary, garlic, mint, obviously: delicious. Big glass of rioja? Perfect.
I went through a couple of years of hits from when I was in high school. The vast majority of them were for supermarket frozen pizza or pizza sauce. Pizza places were mentioned, but literally not one ad for a pizza place appeared. I did find an obituary for Joseph Petrillo, the “king of pizzas” who opened in his “pizza establishment and bakery” in 1923. A Petrillo’s Bakery still exists but it seems like the pizza places have recently closed. A 1950 article, however, said there was only one pizza place in the city and that wsn’t his. One thing I noticed was that most of the mentions were west of the Genesee River. The river divides Rochester down the middle and there’s a huge east/west split in the city. It’s hard to imagine how huge now when everybody goes everywhere. I was an eastsider. The river might as well have been the Berlin Wall.
I wouldn’t expect a pizzeria to advertise in the Democrat and Chronicle, but I did find this The Rochester NY Pizza Blog: A little Rochester pizza history . You’ll see in the comments that pizza was often sold in Italian bakeries and of course, restaurants might have served pizza without any hint of it in the name or the ads.
But I wouldn’t quite say you’re an anomaly - “when you had your first slice of pizza” is not going to depend solely on the availability of pizza where you live. It’s also going to depend on what your parents cook and eat. My parents both grew up in the same neighborhood in Queens, and I guarantee you that my mother had her first slice of pizza long before my father did. For two reasons- one , my mother’s parents were Italian and my father’s parents were Austrian. Her family made pizza at home, (although I don’t know how closely it resembled what is served in pizzerias) and his did not. But the other reason is my paternal grandparents didn’t go for spit and they certainly wouldn’t have spent money on any “Eyetalian” food. I doubt my father ate anything other than home cooking until he got a job and it would not surprise me to find out my grandmother had her first slice of pizza at one of my birthday parties in the late sixties.
In the 70s I remember my siblings turning up the radio on Thanksgiving to hear it. It was already a thing just a few years after it was recorded. I thought it was funny but I was too young to understand that it was a protest song.* I listened to NYC radio and it’s possible that it started there on WNEW. Radio is full of thieves and everyone will steal an idea and claim it to be their own. It may be impossible to determine who first played it.
*Most consider it an anti-war song but I’ve heard Arlo say he considers it an anti-stupid song.
Last year I heard AR on the radio for Thanksgiving, but indeed I had either not heard of that “tradition” before last year or only read about it here, I forget which.