Flour Power

Di Presa's suicide wasn't the only change in the air.

It was the swinging 60's and the psychedelic movement was changing American music forever.

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Meanwhile, in the dusty Central Valley, a different type of "flour power" was about to unfold - pizza flour.

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'Actually, we didn't use flour. We- We used a mix. It was, uh, more of a... powder. But, uh, yeah, after Di Presa died, we- we kept the name of the restaurant exactly the same... because I- I didn't want to get new menus printed and the sign was too expensive to change and there was all that to deal with. So we kept the name sort of as a tribute to Di Presa himself... even though once the civil rights movement came, then he probably wouldn't have been too popular of a guy.

Anyway, [clears throat] when I took over, I had decided the first thing to do was to get customers in the door. It was a different era in those days. You couldn't just serve pizza; you needed, uh, a gimmick to draw the families in, something that made it a fun place to go. You had your pizza, yes. But you also had magic shows, comedians, and [chuckles] most popular of all was the combination of pizza and a pipe organ.'

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'We had an elderly gentleman named Gus Huddle, played the organ here five nights a week, Tuesdays through Saturdays, since the place first reopened.'

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'When Gus turned 95, he- he cut down his schedule to two nights a week and he kept up with it until he died at the age of 99... of AIDS.

So then we got Neil Hamburger through, uh, an ad in The Pennysaver and he worked out real well, so we put a tarp over the organ and we used the pipes to store pizza mix.'