Finding a Way to Give Her Daughters a Share of the Pie
She catches the bus just after dawn and gets to work at 7, same as she has for 28 years.
No days off. No vacation since 1980. Two days out of seven, she leaves work a couple hours early and gets home to Studio City at 5 p.m. instead of 7. That’s the big break she gives herself.
Not that it’s any of my business, but one day I asked Ursula Russo if she has enjoyed her life. She smiled at me from behind the counter at Tony’s Pizza in the Farmers Market, 3rd and Fairfax, and here’s what she said:
“I made a choice. I chose to put my two daughters through college, and if you make the commitment, this is what you do.”
There was no regret in her voice. If anything, the smile broadened.
I didn’t see Ursula for several days, but I thought about her often. I thought about how, in a complicated world populated by people who find ways to complicate it further still, she had found meaning in simplicity and hard work, her life a small garden well tended. One morning, I went back to bother her for the rest of the story.
Ursula wasn’t sure she had the time, because she’s alone in the restaurant at that hour, bringing water to a boil and getting the big saucepans going. But she brought me in through the back door, by Du-Par’s restaurant, sat me on a stool, and took me to Germany.
Bombs rained down on her little town in northern Germany during World War II. Ursula lived in shelters with her mother as the town was blown off the face of the Earth, and with the end of the war came more tragedy. Her father, a soldier, was missing in action.
“Until they show me where he’s buried,” Ursula says 55 years later, “he will always be missing in action.”
Ursula would have loved to go to college in Germany, but it was out of the question. She and her mother struggled to get by, then moved to America to start new lives, settling in Los Angeles 40 years ago. Ursula found work at Gilmore Bank, and a decade later married an Italian immigrant named Tony Russo, who flipped pizzas at Patsy’s in the Farmers Market.
Together, they started Tony’s Pizza, and a family, too. First came Antonietta, then Eva. Tony already had a daughter named Vincenza, whom Ursula embraced.
She interrupts the story to hand some bread to a lady friend who appears at the counter.
No charge.
A lot of people in need count on her regularly, Ursula says. On Saturdays, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament come by for food to serve at their shelters, and Ursula loads them up with whatever they need.
No charge.
“What could be more valuable than a friend?” Ursula asks as the woman walks away with the bread.
Things didn’t work out with Tony. They’re still friends, but as husband and wife, they grew apart, and as an old-school guy, Tony wasn’t keen on sending Antonietta and Eva to college. But Ursula, who had missed her own opportunity, refused to let the same thing happen to her daughters.
When Antonietta finished high school, Ursula marched into the office of the Gilmore family, which manages the market. She was a nervous wreck, not sure they’d think she could run the place on her own. But they worked a deal to keep her, and Ursula bought Tony out of the restaurant, determined to go it alone.
“There is such opportunity in this country, and I always told my daughters that they must take advantage of it,” Ursula said. “You have to work for it, but the sky is the limit.”
Antonietta got into UCLA, and Ursula paid her way.
Then Eva got into UCLA, and Ursula paid her way.
Her daughters would leave for college in the morning, and Ursula would catch the 218 bus at 6:41 a.m. for the ride to work. When the girls were free, they helped at the restaurant.
It was an education paid for with pepperoni pizza and eggplant parmigiana, and with the assistance the girls earned through scholarships.
“The youngest was Phi Beta Kappa her junior year,” Ursula says with a great glow as she sets a giant pot of minestrone on the back burner, the kettle-black stove biting the morning chill in the open-air stall.
Today, Antonietta, 32, is a clinical psychologist in Salt Lake City. “When she’s back home and comes by to help, I tell my customers they were just waited on by a doctor,” says Ursula.
Eva, 30, teaches German language and literature at Penn State University’s Erie campus.
“My mother was a role model,” Eva says by phone from the university.
The tuition has been paid up for years, but Ursula won’t leave Tony’s Pizza.
“That’s her life,” says Eva. “It’s not just a job for her.”
At 65, friends ask Ursula when she’ll retire. She should travel the world, they tell her. But she’s not interested.
“My customers travel, and they come here and tell me about it, and I can see the world through their experiences. I have customers who say they come back because the food is the same as it always was. I can guarantee the quality of it, and there are people who need me here.”
Ursula has six pots going now, working the stove like the conductor of a symphony. Her employees will be in soon, she says, and start preparing the pizza.
“God bless America,” she says. “This is a country where a German immigrant can send her daughters to college selling spaghetti. God bless America.”
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Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com
