When the fire damage to Montevallo Drug Co. had been cleared away and the store remodeled and brought back to life, Jack Sims returned to his familiar location on Main Street sometime in 1959. He enjoyed several years of renewed popularity with his customers, young and old. But by 1964, new opportunities presented themselves, so Sims took advantage of the option to re-locate the business into a much larger space in the brand new Whaley Shopping Center that opened that year on the block at the southeast corner of Main and Middle Streets.
Following the move across the street, the old drug store space remained vacant for about a year until an enterprising fellow from out-of-town, named Sam Durkin, came to Montevallo with high hopes of attracting business from hungry Alabama College students. He opened the town’s first-ever pizza parlor in February of 1965 and called it The Pizza Villa.
The soda fountain and fixtures of the drug store were completely removed and a large pizza oven and prep kitchen were installed near the front door. Sam installed plush, comfortable restaurant booths on either side of the store and made sure that he had plenty of additional seating by placing tables and chairs in the open floor. It seemed that he spared no expense because of the fancy bubbling and trickling water fountain stationed at the entrance that greeted customers as they came in.
In 1965, “big-city style pizza” was an unfamiliar food item to most small town Southerners, so Sam felt the need to introduce the concept as well as himself and his restaurant to Montevallo and his prospective customers. He hit on the idea of blanketing the town with printed flyers proclaiming that anyone who came to the Pizza Villa with one of these flyers on the first Sunday night it was open would receive one free 12" cheese pizza. He probably expected that this promotion might attract a few curious patrons enticed by the notion of something new and free, but little did he know that he had unleashed a wave of attention and interest that nearly overwhelmed him and his staff in the first week they were open.
Somehow the free pizza flyers made their way into the hands of a considerable number of people who lived in the rural areas outside the city limits as well as in the nearby former coal mining communities that had been fairly prosperous not so long ago. Rather than the well-heeled college students, college faculty and staff, and successful citizens of Montevallo that Sam was expecting as his clientele, a much different demographic crossed his threshold on this particular night.
Married couples with large families flocked into the Pizza Villa that Sunday expecting to feed the horde of hungry, unruly children they had brought with them with cheese pizzas they felt entitled to according to the promise on the fistful of flyers they had collected for the occasion.
Shortly after dark, every booth and table in the restaurant was packed with people waiting for free pizza. There were only so many pizzas that the pizza oven could cook at one time, so the orders backed up by the dozens as more and more people came in to cash in on this culinary bonanza.
Sam and the staff of the Pizza Villa put their hearts, minds, and hands into the task and made and baked pizzas for hours until they ran out of ingredients. Sam had to disappoint quite a few people that night who had been waiting a long time for their free treat, but they were told that the “free pizza” commitment stated on the flyer would be honored if the holder came back to claim it on another day. Who knows how many in this category returned after enduring this strange ordeal?
Sam Durkin persevered and managed to build a decent business in spite of his unceremonious initiation to life on Main Street, but it was not a roaring success. The Pizza Villa lasted a couple of years and for a while offered a good local option to young people for “date night.” Pizza at the Pizza Villa and a movie at the Strand became the thing to do.
But Sam didn’t make it for the long haul and soon vacated and was replaced by a slot-car racing track known as “Red Lawley’s Family Hobby Center.” This business lasted an even shorter period of time and was followed by a Sears Catalog Store operated by Hal Sawyer that endured for a number of years.
The current occupants of the space, Charlotte Conwell and Steve Sears, in addition to several renters along the way, have been in the building since 1984 and 1985 respectively, but there are few buildings on Main Street with stories more colorful or differentiated.
Thank you Clay Nordan, Vice President of Montevallo Historical Society, for this information!
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