Death of (or at least injury to) a neighborhood institution

It's tough to make it in the restaurant business anywhere, but it seems the challenges grow exponentially on our little Eastside.  Charlie's Pizza, owned by Charlie Langdon, was one of those rare instances where hard work, delicious food and owner charisma combined to form something magical.  It was like Cheers, but with added garlic.  You always saw someone you knew either waiting for their takeout, or sitting in a booth guiltily enjoying their garlic knots.  If you were really lucky, you hit a day when Charlie himself was there and could pull up a chair and chat for awhile.   

Charlie and his family moved hear from New York state in the early 80's.  The reason I first checked out the restaurant was because his son, Chris, was in my homeroom, and we became really good friends in high school.  Back then the restaurant was called Pizza Shack and was blocks from the high school, and it quickly became another hangout for our big group of friends.  I'm sure just the curiosity surrounding the new Northerners was enough to get people in the doors initially.  But once you met Charlie and Nancy, his equally endearing wife who was always there helping out at first, you didn't want to leave.  They also were great about employing high school kids, my brother being one of them.  They were so good to everybody who worked for them, and became like surrogate parents to lots of kids.

They moved to a different location in 92, but everybody still living in this neighborhood moved right with them.  That's about when my grandparents discovered them and started wanting to eat there on many Saturday nights.  Charlie and Nancy became even better friends to our whole family, and were very sad when my grandfather died and my grandmother decided to move back to Fredericksburg a year later.  I think for a long time it was too painful for my Mom or I to eat there.  

We started eating there again 5 or 6 years ago, and quickly grew to love the place all over again.  I introduced Jav to the place when we started dating, and he loved it too.  The first time we took my nephew Cade, he was so enchanted by Charlie he couldn't stop talking about him, and wanted to know when we could go back.  Charlie just has that effect on people.

We found out a couple of weeks ago that Charlie has decided to retire.  The neighborhood had become a tough place to exist, and business had been waxing and waning since the block became known as a bad panhandler area.  Nancy said he was just tired.  They've sold the business to a lawyer who wants to continue the restaurant in the same spirit, but there's just no way that place will be anything but bricks and mortar without Charlie's personality.  Jav and I are really sad, not just that another great neighborhood business is biting the dust, but that our area is losing such wonderful people.   

His last night is coming up, and it's looking like it might be a mini-reunion.  Chris is even coming into town from Atlanta.  We'll try to send them out with a bang!