I discovered pizza in 1964 in Cedar Falls, Iowa. In this old house down the street from the college, the proprietors served round thin flat hot bread with tomato sauce, cheese and Italian sausage. I remember the sausage because it was not sliced from a link like you’d find on sandwiches and other dishes. The sausages on top were irregular hand-pinched hot-crisped dollops that tasted to a Midwestern teenager like heaven from the oven.

I never forgot that taste.

I grew, I traveled and I found other pizzas, but those pizzas did not taste the same. That first sausage pie was the best ever, and I missed it soooo.

As a student in Italy, I found the home of pizza. Well, actually, the origins of the dish go back to Greece where the locals covered their bread (pitta) with oils, herbs and cheese. It wasn’t really pizza yet, but the Romans liked the word pitta and got to thinking. What if you took that dough and pinched it down (pinsere, to press, in Latin) into a flat bread (a pittsa – starting to sound like pizza) and baked that pittsa with oil and cheese on top in an over? Presto, Change-oh!!! Those Italians had invented pizza, and the folks down the coast in Naples did it best. Their Neapolitan flatbread pizza with tomato sauce (red), basil (green) and mozzarella cheese (white) looked so like the Italian flag that Queen Margherita named it her favorite. You can still find that red, green and white Pizza Margherita in just about any good pizza joint in the world.

I looked and I did. I found the Queen’s pizza and many other varieties. I became something of a pizza junkie. But, I never found that first pizza. Where was it? I dreamed at night of that original thin delicious sausage pie that had introduced me to the pizza world. The taste of that pizza pie remained forever locked in my taste buds waiting to be reawakened and released.

Louis Canelakes moved from Waukegan, Illinois to work in the restaurants of Fort Worth and Dallas. By all accounts, Louie was a very likeable fellow who made friends easily. Yesterday’s paper described him as something of a streetwise Greek philosopher who treated princes and paupers alike, could talk with anyone about anything, and made strangers feel like regulars.

After serving in other people’s restaurants, Louie decided to open his own. In 1985, he found what looks like and old gas station on the east side of Dallas, painted it white and put up a small sign with his name.

For the new establishment, Louie wanted something special. He wanted to serve pizza, but not just any pizza. He wanted to serve Waukegan-style pizza with box-cut slices. With his brother, Louie did just that. The restaurant was a success, and the pizza was rated Best in Dallas.

I did not know any of this when I moved to Dallas in 2006. I was just hungry for pizza. One evening a friend suggested we try a place she’d read about in the paper, a hang-out for newspaper reporters, a local joint with a reputation for good food.

Sure, why not?

When we walked through the door, I wondered at the framed hand-drawn caricatures covering the walls. The interior was dark and small. Friendly faces talked at the bar and around at the tables. The tables and chairs were definitely not fancy, mostly old plastic lawn furniture. When we sat down, the smiling waitress propped up a table leg with a folded paper napkin to keep the top from rocking. We ordered pizza, and we waited. Nothing seemed to move fast. I watched other pies delivered on round metal plates. I could see the pizza was definitely a thin crust with an odd cut, in little squares. I noticed no one was leaving any food on their plates. We talked and sipped and waited. From the kitchen, I spied our waitress approaching, a pan over her head. With a flourish, she swung the pizza down to the middle of our table and whisked away.

We looked together.

I carefully extracted a square from the steaming pie and slid the piece onto the small white plate. It was hot. I waited. I lifted the square, blowing on it, opened my mouth and bit into the crust and cheese and sauce and the small mounded morsel of crisped sausage. . . .

I never met Louie. He died Sunday. I know one thing. He makes the best pizza in the world. With that first bite, I found the pizza of my dreams. I’d come home, and I haven’t stopped coming back since.

I think the best people in the world are those who spend their lives making others happy.

Thank you, Louis Canelakes.

Grandpa Jim