Just read your entire Down Pizza Memory Lane post and loved it! I went to high school in the late 50's (graduated in 1960) in a rural area and pizzaria pizza was just newly available in the largest town about 12 miles away. My senior class decided to have a pizza fund-raiser for our senior trip to Washington, DC, so we bought a whole lot of Appian Way pizza mixes and rounded up all the pie pans we could. Very few households had pizza pans, but we recruited all of those we could. I don't think pepperoni was available in our local grocery stores, so we topped the pizzas with sliced hot dogs or cooked crumbled sausage or hamburger! No extra herbs or spices. No cheese other than the powdered Parmesan. My boyfriend told me that his mother (raised in deep Appalachia) always pre-baked pie crusts about 5 minutes, even before filling fruit pies, and employing that step probably improved our product! We had no idea what we were doing, but we had a huge turnout and a gym full of teenagers and townspeople scarfing up our creations (probably cost something like 75 cents for pie pan size, a dollar for pizza pan size).

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