Pat’s Pizza isn’t just a place, it’s a state of mind.

Pizza: usually a large open pie made typically of thinly rolled bread dough spread with a spiced mixture (as in tomatoes, ground meat, cheese, garlic, oil) and baked. (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged)

Pat’s Pizza: usually a place filled typically with a variety of people (as in old, young, male, female) and beloved. (local consensus)

August 31, 2006

 When Carl “Pat” Farnsworth first took over the little Orono ice cream shop in that would eventually become Pat’s Pizza in 1931, the very word “pizza” was alien to most Mainers’ tongues. It wasn’t until the late 40s that pizza started to gain popularity in the Northeast, largely due to soldiers returning home from World War II with a newly developed taste for the classic Italian dish known colloquially as “tomato pie.” But in the early 1930s, Pat Farnsworth was just a hard-working young ice cream shop owner with no aspirations to becoming “Maine’s Pizza King.” In fact, according to Farnsworth’s son, Bruce, his father’s lifelong association with pizza began with a simple desire to satisfy the tastes of his customers.

“When he was young, Dad worked with his father…my grandfather George Farnsworth…at the Lookout Hotel in Ogunquit every summer,” Bruce Farnsworth says. “My grandfather was the chef there. Dad got room and board for the summer, and he brought home $150 for the season.”

It was at the end of one of those long hot summer seasons that Farnsworth, supplementing his hard-earned cash with some borrowed money, bought out the owner of a struggling ice cream shop on Mill Street in Orono. The owner had taken a major financial hit when the stock market crashed in 1929, had never recovered, and was looking to get out of the business. Farnsworth just happened to be in a position to make that possible.

“Dad really just walked in and took over,” the younger Farnsworth says. “The shop sold ice cream and candy and fruit. It wasn’t a pizza place. No one around here was making pizza at that time. It wasn’t until the fifties that a little pizza shop opened up around the corner on Main Street.”

The pizza shop around the corner turned out to be a popular place, even among the locals and college students who were regular customers at Farnsworth’s place. Some of them started bringing slices of pizza with them into the downstairs tap room that Farnsworth had opened after Prohibition ended in 1932. After a few months of watching his customers wash down their pizza slices with his beer, Farnsworth decided it was time to jump on the shredded mozzarella-coated bandwagon. He asked his wife Frances to work on getting her own pizza recipe.

“He told my mother that she should probably try and get the recipe,” Bruce Farnsworth says. “So she got the recipe from the guy who owned the pizza shop. Later, he moved his business to Portland, but we always mentioned his restaurant Angeloni’s in our yellow page ads as a thank-you. The ads said something like, ‘And if you’re ever in Portland and want pizza, try Angeloni’s.’”

Of course, in those early days, there wasn’t much variety among the pizzas that Pat’s offered. They were mostly plain cheese or topped with pepperoni. Bruce Farnsworth recalls that in his youth, he even had an aversion to the most fundamental ingredient of pizza: tomato sauce.

“I’d eat pizza, just without any sauce on it. Then, later on, I had one with sauce and decided that I liked it,” he recalled.

The popularity of Pat’s pizzas soared quickly, thanks to the special recipe that Frances Farnsworth brought home at her husband’s request. But son Bruce also attributes much of the success of the restaurant to the fact that his family has always tried to keep their prices “at rock-bottom.”

“We want people to always be able to afford to eat here,” he says. “We want our regulars to always be able to come in and order a pizza without worrying about whether they can afford it.”

“Our regulars” is more than just an off-handed phrase when spoken in connection with a seventy-five year old business. In the days before smoking became taboo inside public eateries, anyone walking into Pat’s during the morning hours was usually greeted by a thick tobacco-scented cloud courtesy of the “regulars” who had gathered to smoke their cigarettes, sip their morning coffee, and mull over the latest local news. The “regulars” are still there, too, sans cigarette smoke, and with some addition and subtraction having taken place among their number. But their enduring presence is proof that, over the years, Pat’s has become more than just a place to eat and drink. It stands as a “last bastion” of local community, where the same people come in over and over again, drawn by the sense of familiarity that makes the weathered interior a home away from home.

Those who have spent a lot of time at Pat’s, and even those who have only made a few memorable stops there, often take their affection for it with them to far-off places. In Bruce Farnsworth’s downstairs office, inside a paper folder stuffed with old photographs, yellowed newspaper clippings, and other miscellany associated with the restaurant’s long history, there is a Polaroid snapshot of a Pat’s cardboard pizza box adorned with the familiar green and orange logo balanced atop a pile of ammunition. A soldier from Maine who was stationed in Iraq at the time sent it to him. Looking at it, Bruce says that he guesses the pizza box just made the soldier feel like he still had a little piece of home around.

People have called from all over the world asking the restaurant to send pizzas to them. Bruce says that he and his staff try to oblige such callers, even though mailing pizzas across the world can be costly. But the people who work at Pat’s are nothing if not a large, sprawling family who seem to consider going above and beyond the call of duty standard practice.

Take Frances Cyr, who is just going into her forty-seventh year of employment at Pat’s. She’ll tell you how, one night when her sister, who worked at Pat’s, asked her to come in and sub for an absent dishwasher. It was just supposed to be just for that one night. But the temporary dishwashing gig turned into a lifelong career, which, Cyr says, she does not regret one bit.

“I had four kids and I didn’t want to have to go far to work,” she explains. “I lived in Orono, and Pat’s was close. Fran (Farnsworth) used to pick me up and drive me to work. “

Cyr also has the distinction of never having been late for work during her entire tenure at the restaurant. She was almost late once, she admits, but after that close call, she became even more committed to avoiding tardiness. Even now that she lives in Greenbush and only works one or two days a week, she gets up at four every morning to make sure that she gets to work on time.

“I told myself that I was going to keep working until I made it to forty-five years. Then, after that, it became fifty. But we’ll see what happens. I’m taking it one day at a time,” she says.

Cyr is quick to point out that she is not the only long-time employee of Pat’s still on the payroll. Laurie Ballaroan has been there over thirty years and is still an active, daily presence in the restaurant. Carol White is another long-term employee whose name carries the weight of history. Cheryl Ouelette, began working at Pat’s when she was in her late teens. For a while, her mother and sister worked there, too. But, eventually, her sister moved on, and her mother died several years ago. Now, Pat’s has become a kind of sacred place for her, where the almost tangible memories of working beside her mother bring a sense of comfort.

“I’ve worked here off and on ever since high school,” Ouelette says. “This last stretch, it’s been about five years. People ask me why I keep coming back here, and I tell them that it’s like being with my family. This is the last place I worked with my mother before she got sick. So being here now, the memories of that time are really close.”

Bruce Farnsworth can recite a long list of names of former employees who have left their mark at Pat’s. Some of them, like the “Langtang girls”, belong to families whose members provided a long line of dynastic service to the restaurant.

“We always had one or two Langtang girls working here as long as I can remember, which is about forty-five years,” he says. “There was Gracie Page, too, who was with us for years and years.”

One notable former employee of Pat’s is Matt Dunlap, current secretary of state and one-time bartender in the tap room. Dunlap’s memories of working at Pat’s remain especially fresh, not just because he believes that his time there helped to shape his political character, but because he bussed tables there as recently as last December.

“I was just filling in, but there’s something about being there on a busy, busy night and doing that kind of simple, rhythmic work that is very relaxing,” he says.

Like most of the men and women who have worked at Pat’s, Dunlap has a wealth of stories and anecdotes to add to the restaurant’s legacy. One of the most pertinent has to do with his wife, whom he met when they were both working at the restaurant. But most of them directly involve Pat, a man who Dunlap describes as “gruff on the exterior, but very kind and generous.”  That kindness and generosity showed itself on more than one occasion, Dunlap says, but almost always in an unexpected way.

“Pat was very well-informed politically,” Dunlap recalls. “He was a pillar of the community, the president of the Kiwanis, one of the biggest Republicans in the county. Bur even though I’m a Democrat, when I was running for state representative, one night he handed me a $50 bill for my campaign. Then about three o’clock one morning after I’d won a three-way race (for the seat), he sat me down and gave me my marching orders.”

According to Dunlap, Farnsworth wanted him to submit legislation supporting “right to work,” taxing church and university property, and cutting minimum wages for waitresses. After listening to Farnsworth hold forth for several minutes, Dunlap says that he could only think of one response.

“I told him that I was a dead man if I did any of that,” he says. “I was surrounded by church and university property, and I was married to a former waitress. Pat looked at me and said,’ You’ve only been in office one week and you’re already a politician.’”

Dunlap has other, equally colorful stories about his erstwhile employer. He tells of the time that someone stole the new leather gloves he’d bought to keep his hands warm when he was walking to work on cold winter nights. He was disappointed and upset, he explains, because he had paid a lot of money for those gloves. But a few nights after they were stolen, Pat surprised him by presenting him with a brand new pair.

“One of my favorite stories about Pat, though, is the time when I was still new at the restaurant,” he says. “It was closing time, and I was on my way downstairs to turn out a light that was still on. I heard this voice yell, ‘Don’t turn off that light!’ It was Pat. He was standing at the top of the stairs and he didn’t want me to turn off the light because, forty years or so before, a drunken man had come out of the bathroom, fallen down the stairs, and broken his neck and died. All those years later, Pat still remembered that and would not allow that light to be turned off. It was the only one in the building that was kept burning all the time.”

For all of the stories that Dunlap and others tell about Pat, there are just as many, but much less told stories about his wife, Frances. Bruce Farnsworth says that she was one of the hardest working long-term “employees” at the restaurant, a woman who rarely missed a day of work, and who could only function comfortably while wearing high-heeled shoes.

“My mother never really got the credit she deserved,” he says. “She was an extremely hard worker. I remember one winter, we had to dig a tunnel for her to get to the door of the restaurant. She came in wearing winter boots, but she took them right off, put on her high heeled shoes, and went to work.”

Tragedy has left is mark among Pat’s employees as well. At least two of the women who worked as waitresses at the restaurant were victims of homicide. One, Barbara Barnes, was murdered by her son in a well-publicized case in the 1990s. The son subsequently fled to New York where he was arrested and from where he was brought back to Maine to stand trial for the crime. Another waitress was found shot in the head in her apartment down the street from Pat’s. Her killer was never found.

“When you’ve been around this long, there’s bound to be a lot of history with the customers and employees,” Bruce philosophizes. “A lot of it was good. But some of it I don’t think you can print in a newspaper.”

One of the more news-friendly anecdotes concerns an older couple who came into the restaurant and sat down at the counter. When Bruce tried to serve them, they told him that they weren’t ready to order because they were waiting for “their” booth to open up.

“That booth was where the husband had proposed to the wife fifty or so years before,” Bruce says. “They got married and went off and lived their lives, but they wanted to celebrate their anniversary in the booth at Pat’s where it had all began.”

Farnsworth himself was the central figure in one of the restaurant’s most notable incidents. One night when his father was in his eighties, Bruce says, he was leaving the restaurant late at night with the cash bag. Lying in wait in the parking lot were two men who had planned to jump the elderly owner of the Orono landmark and steal the day’s earnings. But Farnsworth would have none of it. When the men came at him with pepper spray, he threw the cash bag into his car and ran after them. He may not have run fast, or made a formidable figure, but the would-be assailants were sufficiently taken aback to flee empty-handed into the night.

“My father lived to work,” Bruce says. “He worked right up until he was ninety-two, and the only reason he stopped was that he fell down here in the office and broke his back. Even after that, he wanted to keep working. When the doctors refused to operate on him because they didn’t think he’d make it, that was when he lost interest in living.”

Farnsworth died in 2003, following his wife Francis, who passed away several years earlier. Right up until the end, Bruce says, his father harbored the hope that he would someday be able to return to the business that had been his life’s passion. Even now, three years after his death, his image is indelibly sealed into the very fabric of the restaurant that was his lifelong passion.

“He always had his cigar, his pocket protector with pens, and his little black book,” Bruce says. “In that book, he could tell you everything from the date of Herb Sargent’s birthday to the day the ice went out on Pushaw Lake in 1959.”

Bruce and the rest of the family made sure that the “Pizza King” had what he needed when they finally laid him to rest. They slipped $150 into his wallet so that he could use it as a down payment on his “next project” and secured his little black book in place along with the pocket protector and pens that were part of his daily uniform.

And the pizza recipe? Is it locked away in a vault somewhere like the one for Kentucky Fried Chicken that the late Colonel Sanders stashed away in a safe in Lexington, Kentucky?

“Well, we still have that,” Bruce says. “It was in his head and now it’s in my head. It will be in my son’s head. It’s not written down anywhere.”

Except, maybe, in that little black book that Carl “Pat” Farnsworth took with him to his next business venture.