Slice In Time

It’s barely 6 o’clock on a cold, Saturday night and already the line spills out the front door and down the sidewalk. Teenagers in high school letter jackets and families with kids in tow come expecting the wait. Hipsters rub shoulders with empty nesters in the crowded lobby of the place that’s weathered decades of change without revamping its menu or redesigning its décor. 

If pizza is your comfort food, then Akron’s Luigi’s is your surrogate Italian mother. You can count on her for fresh baked bread, a mountain of mozzarella on top of your salad and a thick, crispy-edged pizza with just the right ratio of ingredients to sauce. 

And you can count on her to treasure your hometown memories – even when preserving them takes way more time and effort than you may have ever imagined. 

That’s why it mattered to owner Tony Ciriello when the bandbox above the entrance (that some people don’t even notice) started acting up last year. When it finally quit working eight months ago, Tony wasn’t sure how much time or money he’d have to invest to get it moving again.

Superman and Barbie

Like everything at Luigi’s, the mechanical bandbox has a history. You can see it in a 1951 picture of the restaurant on the celebrity photo wall in the main dining room.                       

Tony was just a kid in the ‘70s when his uncle Mickey Ciriello rescued the broken-down band from storage. Even then, coin-operated bandboxes – that gave customers something fun to watch when the jukebox was playing – became relics. They were rarities that few people cared about or knew how to refurbish. 

The restaurant’s electrician, Butch Pastik, did the rewiring and a repairman at an old jukebox warehouse in Cleveland got the mechanical parts working again. Then Mickey and some friends began looking for characters to replace the old foam band members – brittle and crumbling from dry rot.

After discovering that Ken dolls and GI Joes didn’t work in the bandbox, Mickey settled on some 8-inch action figure Superman dolls. They were just the right size, and their arms were flexible enough to be posed with the musical instruments. Then he decided to swap out the male lead singer for a more glamorous blond Barbie.

Mickey hired a local seamstress to create tuxedos for the band and created mop-top wigs for their heads. He replaced worn-out rubber bands with metal springs to keep the various parts moving and cut a piece from a roll-up snow sled to cover the missing red plastic facing below the stage floor. That first reclamation took seven years to complete.

Painstaking restoration

Tony called jukebox companies, electricians and even a car alarm guy but no one had the background or expertise to tackle the project.

Then one day last summer, a customer dropped off a phone number for Keith Miller, a local man who’s been collecting and restoring coin-operated pinball machines, slots, vintage soda dispensers, jukeboxes and gumball machines since the early ‘80s. Tony didn’t know who provided Miller’s number. Still, he made the call. Coincidentally, Miller lives just minutes from Tony’s house in the Portage Lakes. 

“He’s worked with people all over the country on this stuff,” Tony says, amazed to find the expert he was looking for right in his own backyard. “In the first five minutes of talking with Keith, I knew this is the guy I’d trust to repair and restore my bandbox.”

Miller rewired the bandbox according to its original specifications – in some cases undoing what was done on the fly in the ‘70s. He painstakingly cleaned and restored anything that could be salvaged and replaced everything that couldn’t with the goal of making the bandbox look and perform like new. He spent about 100 hours over four months on the project, returning it to Luigi’s in time for Christmas. 

One of a kind

Only a couple thousand Chicago Coin Co. bandboxes were produced, and of the few that remain, almost all are in private collections, Miller says. Luigi’s bandbox is the only one he’s ever seen with a cymbal and an NBC microphone.

Today, reproductions of the band members are available in more long-lasting foam construction. Tony bought a full set in case he needs them in the future. 

For now, a new Barbie doll has replaced the ‘70s lead singer, but the male band members from the first restoration live on. One has been wearing a Superman suit under his tuxedo for all these years. In the tradition of protecting Clark Kent’s real identity, Tony won’t say which one is the true Man of Steel.      

Miller says original restored bandboxes sell for $8,000 to $10,000, “But Luigi’s box, with its local connection, is irreplaceable.” 

The Funky Connection

After being introduced to Luigi’s as a good place to eat after midnight, Medina artist Tom Batiuk, creator of the comic strip “Funky Winkerbean,” says he took his young son Brian there to see the jukebox. It soon became a regular stop on their guys’ night out.

The timing of those early visits in the ‘90s coincided with Batiuk’s plan to restage his comic strip by allowing his characters to start growing up in real time. As part of that reboot, Batiuk gave his main character, Funky, a job delivering pizzas for Montoni’s Italian restaurant. Montoni’s, with visual inspiration from Luigi’s, has been a backdrop for Batiuk’s adult characters ever since.

Then last fall, the strip mentioned that Montoni’s bandbox was out for repairs, joking that maybe the band had retired. It wasn’t until visiting Luigi’s that Batiuk discovered the uncanny timeliness of that strip — created nearly a year in advance of publication. 

Batiuk made an enlargement of the panels referencing Montoni’s bandbox refurbishing, and Tony placed it above the entrance of Luigi’s to let customers know his bandbox wasn’t gone for good. 

 “Certain places in the world are just kinda cool,” Batiuk says. “Luigi’s has that cachet.”