All You Can Eat Pasta and Garlic Bread

The Old Ossining Elks’ Club twenty years after I use to go there for spaghetti dinners. The club and the surrounding property are overgrown with vines and bushes. But back in the 1980s, on Friday nights, it transformed into a bustling Italian restaurant with a dreamlike menu for three hungry teenagers from Croton. Photo, Frederick Douglass Opie.

While on the topic of Italian cuisine, I want to talk about another senior year food escape, but this one in the next town over, Ossining. One Friday during school classmates Ray Fortini and Ed Pothast invited me to eat out with them. One of them asked, “he Op you want to get some good cheap eats tonight?” I jumped on the idea like a horse. Ray and Ed took me to the Elks’ Club in Ossining on the east working class side of Ossining overlooking the Hudson River. The members had taken a beautiful spacious mansion and converted into to their club; an all white working glass club that my classmates never thought might be problematic for me to enter. My mother grew up in Ossining and I knew the town did not have a history free of de-facto Jim Crow practices. Such practices and better schools spurred my folks to move with their three boys from Ossining to Croton in the mid-nineteen sixties. When we walked in it seemed like all eyes turned on us. Nobody made in hostile overtures but they looked surprised to see us. On Friday nights, the Elks’ Club members held an all you can eat spaghetti dinner for something like $4.00. The meal included all you could eat garlic bread and water too. The cooks in the club’s kitchen made very good homemade sauce for the spaghetti and the volunteers kept fantastic warm garlic bread coming by the basket full. Here we were three senior high school athletes with serious appetites. After my first time I became a regular even during summer vacations from college. It reflection it seems to me that perhaps I broke the clubs color line back then because I never saw another African American in the place. The clubs members treated me very well—but then again, I never inquired about becoming a member (smile).