FAIRMONT, W.Va. — Some environments just aren’t meant for eating. Waiting in line to go bungee jumping comes to mind. So does a dentist’s office. I don’t think I could eat while riding in a bobsled, either.
After spending five days in West Virginia, I found another one. I doubt I’d have an appetite while standing a mile underground in a 7-by-15- foot enclosure, one seismic shift or structural error away from being crushed like a weed by a hundred million tons of rock. Nope. Hold the ketchup, folks.
But for more than 100 years, the coal miners of West Virginia have eaten well in an environment that would turn claustrophobics into babbling loons. The miners’ saving grace has been pepperoni rolls. They have evolved from simple pepperoni sticks wrapped in bread to scrumptious, piping-hot buns filled with juicy strips of pepperoni lathered in sauce and peppers.
Immigrants from Calabria, the toe in the Italian peninsula’s boot, flooded into West Virginia for the mining jobs in the late 1800s. The housewives would put pepperoni in bread and give them to their husbands to take down into the mines. Today, the miners are doing the same thing, and locals and visitors alike are flocking here to Colasessano’s and Country Club Bakery to eat like a miner if not work like one.
They’re just eating them at football games, in their homes or, like I did, in the charming, renovated Colasessano’s on a snowy December day.
I chatted with owner John Menas, a descendent of Croatians who also immigrated here and who retired Oct. 17 after 30 years mining coal. His real last name was Mlinac (Ma-LEEN-as), but his teachers butchered it so badly his family Anglicized it.
Pity his poor mom, the former Rosalie Mijcynoiz.
This Marion County, about 90 miles south of Pittsburgh, is a melting pot of Calabrians, Croatians, Hungarians and Russians among other ethnic groups. A century ago this gathering could start a whale of a bar fight, but what they had in common were pepperoni rolls.
“A lot of guys still take them into the mines, but the mines today you have a load (power) center with a microwave and a coffee pot sitting on top of it when back then you didn’t,” said Menas, 55. “Now they can reheat them underground.”
Yes, the mining industry has changed drastically. Today, Menas said, a seven-man shift can mine 35,000 tons of coal in 24 hours. Under the old technology, it would take more than 25 men to do that. It’s also much safer. In the winter of 1968, seven miners walked across a stockpile that broke. They all fell into a feeder where they suffocated in a quicksand of coal.
But I kept thinking back to August, when those six miners in Utah were trapped in a cave-in 1,500 feet underground. I hoped they weren’t trapped in a tiny air pocket and simply wasted away down there.
“They didn’t even know what hit them,” Menas said.
For men like Menas, getting an appetite in this dark, foreboding environment is no different from gettin hungry sitting at a desk or manning a beach rental shop. But it’s not for everybody.
“My uncle went down in the No. 9 mine,” Menas said. “When he got to the bottom of the elevator and the doors opened up and he looked back in the heading (tunnel), he went right back up and said, ‘I quit.’ ”
You don’t have to take pepperoni rolls down an elevator shaft and 6 miles through a tunnel to appreciate them. Sit in Colasessano’s, a former coal- mining store, and see all the celebrities who’ve enjoyed them. On the walls are autographed pictures of West Virginians such as NFL Hall of Famer Sam Huff and West Virginia football coach Rich Rodriguez.
Gov. Joe Manchin, from nearby Farmington, has a picture up. Others who’ve dropped by have included Alabama football coach Nick Saban, from nearby Monongah; Florida basketball coach Billy Donovan, who coached Marshall in Charleston; and Sen. Ted Kennedy. There is nothing from one of Fairmont’s favorite daughters, former Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton, but eating pepperoni rolls isn’t conducive for the balance beam.
They have improved a great deal. In 1936, Cheech Argiro started taking the Calabrians’ simple pepperoni sandwich and baked it, wrapped it in wax paper and sold it to the miners out of Country Club Bakery. In 1950, Spider Colasessano moved here from Buffalo and used his mother-in- law’s pizza recipe to make the buns. Then they split them open, added pepperoni, Oliverio peppers, sauce and provolone cheese.
Mine was off the charts and just $4. It’s a hot, juicy, tangy combination of lean pepperoni, red sauce and sweet peppers that perfectly toed the line between too spicy and too bland. And don’t look for them anywhere else.
“This is a regional thing,” Menas said. “A lot of states won’t let you bake meat inside bread, like Virginia, Maryland. If it would’ve killed anybody, there wouldn’t be nobody living in this county.”
Mining is dangerous enough. Stick to pepperoni rolls.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson @denverpost.com.
If you go
Colasessano’s, 506 Pennsylvania Ave., Fairmont, W.Va., 304-363-9713
Country Club Bakery, 1211 Country Club Road, Fairmont, W.Va., 304-363-5690
