Sunday, Mar. 03, 2013 | 08:15 AM
Question: In the 1940s, my late cousin, Mike Pentimone, came to Fresno from New Jersey and opened the Italian Kitchen at Palm and Olive avenues. He owned it for a only few years before moving back home, but the family has always believed it was the first pizzeria in Fresno. Was it?
-- Ann Goodwin, Clovis
Answer: Carl Rana, whose family owned the Italian Kitchen from 1949 or 1950 until 1982, said the family bought the pizzeria at 1120 N. Palm Ave. from Mike Pentimone.
"He was heading back to New Jersey. He'd had it with the Valley," Carl Rana said. "He only had it for a year or two."
According to the timeline Rana recalls, Pentimone could have opened his pizzeria in 1947, which would make it Fresno's first pizzeria.
In 1948, Rana's uncle Pete Rana opened Capri Italian Restaurant at the new Farmer's Market on Divisadero Street in partnership with his father-in-law, Dominick De Piloto. The Capri also served pizza.
Whether the two Italian restaurants opened in the same year, or Pentimone's opened a year earlier, both can lay claim to introducing Fresno to the pizza, a dish so unfamiliar here that very few people knew how to eat it.
Pete Rana's wife, Lola, recalled in a 1982 Bee story how she showed customers how to bend a pizza slice in the middle and eat it as finger food.
"They'd try to roll it like an enchilada," she said. "Most of them tried a fork and knife, then reverted to bending it and chomping on it. They'd remark that it even tasted better this way."
Pete Rana's brother, Maurice, joined him in the business in 1954. In 1964, the Ranas built a new restaurant at 1127 N. Palm Ave., across the street from the original location.
Maurice Rana opened Rana's Pizza and Spaghetti House at Palm and Shaw avenues in 1972. It closed in about 1978.
Pete and Lola Rana closed the Italian Kitchen in 1982.
Q: Was there a Houghton Elementary School near Rolinda in the 1940s?
-- Judy Ellis, Fresno
A: The one-room Houghton Grammar School was built in 1887 on Whites Bridge Road in the Rolinda area, 10 miles west of Fresno. The school had 17 students the first year. Their teacher, Edith Staube, was paid $60 a month.
A school district was organized two months after the school opened. Most of the children living in the Rolinda area attended Houghton.
In 1920, Houghton briefly joined the Kerman Union High School District before becoming part of the Central Union High School District.
In April 1947, Principal Kathryn Ries, Houghton's 110 students and hundreds of alumni celebrated the school's 60th anniversary. By then, a new four-room school had been built, but most of the original building still was standing.
In 1949, voters approved the merger of the Houghton district with the Kearney School District, southwest of Fresno.
In 1951, ground was broken for a new Houghton-Kearney Union Elementary School on Whites Bridge Road, which would have six classrooms, a kindergarten room, a multipurpose room, kitchen and office.
