Ron Puglisi: The pizza king of Ashland County

ASHLAND — It’s always been pizza for Ron Puglisi. 

The dough, hand-kneaded and baked to a golden crisp; the shredded mozzarella, bubbly and just-the-right-amount of greasy; and the sauce — the anchor — rounding it all together.

He doesn’t eat pizza himself. But after 50 years in the business, the 68-year-old Puglisi has perfected the slice for his loyal customers. 

“Everybody eats pizza at least once, right?” he says, in-between serving customers from his pizza trailer at the Loudonville Street Fair the first week of October. 

It was a special week for Puglisi and his customers. It’s the only time of the year where he concocts “gourmet” pies: white garlic, spinach ricotta and unorthodox ingredients like zucchini or squash found at the local farmer’s market.

Puglisi doesn’t offer his pizza — gourmet or otherwise — for delivery. He doesn’t have a shop, a website or a social media presence. So if you want his pizza, you’d better get to one of the 14 fairs he frequents these days. 

It’s part of his business strategy, he says. If his product is too ubiquitous, that means fewer returning customers at the events. In other words, Puglisi limits the supply in order to drive up demand. 

And it works — at least anecdotally. 

“We follow him around,” says Laura Loftis.

She enjoyed two slices of pepperoni-and-mushroom pie with her husband, Charlie, on a busy night at the Ashland County Fairgrounds in September. 

An older gentleman, after purchasing a single slice on a different day, tells Puglisi he always looks forward to seeing the pizza trailer at the fair. 

“You have the best pizza in Ohio,” he says. 

But if you ask Puglisi, his pizza trailer — and its product — is only a means to make a living. No special force behind it, really. No magic. 

It’s simply what he had to do.

Puglisi comes from an Italian family — the kind that ate big meals around a big table together, food made with ingredients mashed together from recipes that no one ever wrote down. 

There is no Puglisi Family Recipe Book — just time watching people like his father, or grandfather, or great aunt, put it all together. 

On Sundays, Puglisi remembers the family going to church while his dad stayed behind and prepared the day’s food. Typically that meant “Sunday Sauce,” a tomato-based dish made with meat and simmered for hours.  

His grandfather, a widower, had to learn how to cook for four growing boys. Puglisi remembers his grandfather’s “world’s best” bread and his great aunt’s “true, Italian pizza.” 

“Blobs of fresh mozzarella, no sauce. Usually just slices of tomato and fresh herbs,” he says.

Through the years, Puglisi has attempted to replicate these dishes. But mostly they live on in memory. It’s better that way, he says.

At age 17, his senior year at Ashland High School, Puglisi started working at a pizza shop in town. That’s where he learned how to make what would later become his living. 

But it wasn’t his first choice of career. Puglisi graduated from The Ohio State University in 1976 with a degree in sociology, aiming toward a master’s degree in ethnomethodology — the study of how people make sense of the world. 

His plan, at the time, was to work at any one of the big companies across the country hiring psych and sociology majors to mediate relations between workers and unions. In the midst of industry strife throughout the early 1970s, the idea was maybe these college grads could smooth things over to prevent further strikes and tumultuous working conditions. 

But by 1974, two years before Puglisi graduated, the trend of companies hiring psych and sociology majors slowed. He couldn’t find a job.

So he spent nine years working as a pizza concessionary before starting his own trailer, using those interpersonal skills learned in college to connect with all sorts of people and learn how to run a successful business.

“I use my degree every day dealing with John Q. Public. Lotta fun people out here,” he says with a wry smile.

There’s no better picture of this work than a Friday night at the Ashland County Fair.

“Wipe that off.”

“She wants plain cheese.” 

“Behind you.” 

“Move those down.” 

A crew of five inside Puglisi’s pizza trailer are heading into the second hour of a busy dinner rush. There’s no line, more like a crowd shouting ingredients. 

“Three plain, one pepperoni mushroom.” 

“Two pepperoni.” 

“Large Pepsi.” 

Running a pizza trailer is hard, invigorating work. Conditions are sometimes downright inhospitable, especially on a summer night next to an oven turned up to 475 degrees.

Despite this reality, Puglisi has a loyal crew with decades of experience at his side. One such person is Victoria Baldridge, who has worked with Puglisi for 33 years. 

“It gets in your blood,” Baldridge says during a break one night at the Ashland County Fair, her hair tied back in a tortoiseshell clip. 

The “it” is the fast pace. The people-watching. The banter. The lack of niceties.

Two other crew members, Marcy Doyle and Nancy Noble, run the register with the precision of a Swiss watch. Slices of pizza are moving fast, change is counted accurately — an exchange lasts only seconds before their eyes scan to the next customer. 

“Ron doesn’t like to see a line,” Doyle says. 

A real estate agent in town, Doyle has worked with Puglisi for 26 years. His expectation means there’s no time for polite small talk. It also means efficiency, which is always good for business. 

It’s good for the fair, too — which according to Puglisi receives 20% of all vendors’ gross food sales as part of its privilege fee revenue. 

Earnings have been “mediocre” this year, Puglisi says. Inflation has hurt. Food costs are up. 

According to Cathy Rice, secretary of the Ashland County Agricultural Society, between 2014 and 2019, food sale revenue hovered around $85,000 a year. Yet from 2021 to 2023, that average reached $105,000 — a 23.5% increase.

Despite the increase in food sale revenue, the fair’s attendance remained relatively steady at around 89,000 from 2015 to 2024. In other words, the same amount of people are coming to the fair, but spending more on food.  

Back in his early years, Puglisi charged 75 cents a slice and $8 for a whole pie. Nowadays he charges $4 per slice and $20 for a whole pie, a fare that hasn’t changed for three years now.

His prices are significantly lower than his competitors. One trailer charges $35, and another at the Wayne County Fair charges $40 for a plain cheese pizza. 

“And then two dollars per topping. So $42 for a pepperoni pizza,” he says, scoffing.

To keep prices low, Puglisi orders large amounts of ingredients ahead of events — we’re talking 400 pounds of cheese and 150 pounds of pepperoni, all stored at his Montgomery Township farmhouse. 

He uses roughly 50 pounds of dough every day at the Ashland County Fair alone.

It’s 6 o’clock. Ashland fairgoers are hungry. They’re scanning the 74 food trailers sprawled throughout the grounds, like bees searching for pollen in a garden of flowers. 

A customer named Cory places an order for a whole pizza. The crew starts buzzing. 

Toby Beck, who has worked with Puglisi for nearly 40 years, sprinkles flour onto a shiny countertop before slapping it with a ball of proofed dough. His red apron is dotted with tiny cartoon pizza chefs that lean with him into the dough, flattening it with a metal roller. 

He then stretches the dough into a circle and slides it to Baldridge, who coats it with a bright-red tomato puree infused with Puglisi’s concoction of “secret herbs and spices.” She dresses the pizza with cheese, pepperoni and mushrooms. 

Roughly 12 minutes later, the pizza sizzles out of the oven into the hands of Puglisi, who wields a curved blade and divides the pie into eight even slices. 

Cory walks over, a $20 bill in his outstretched hand. “Don’t do that,” Puglisi says. “You’re a friend.”

He takes the bill and, without hesitation, rips it in half. “And I don’t take ripped money,” he says. 

Cory is dumbfounded. He takes his money back and looks at the two halves with wide eyes. But he quickly pockets the destroyed bill because Puglisi is handing him his box of pizza.

“Love you, Ron,” he quips. “See ya.” 

Later, Puglisi laughs about it with his crew. 

“He looked surprised,” he says. 

The exchange points to a familiar side of the pizza king for those who know him. Doyle described Puglisi as “kind-hearted,” noting his many behind-the-scenes acts of generosity.  

“He’s phenomenal,” she says. “Once, he paid $300 for a pie a kid made at the Loudonville Street Fair. A lot of times he’s paid for the admissions for seniors. He’s very giving.” 

Two clerks behind the front counter at the Ashland County Fair’s office agreed, describing Puglisi as someone who cares deeply about the community. They often make their approval of his behavior known to him. 

“But whenever we say something nice about him, he always says ‘don’t tell anyone,’” one clerk says. She declines to provide her name, to remain impartial to all the other food vendors. 

“I don’t want to show favoritism, but …” she trails off.

Puglisi’s pizza trailer used to be seen more frequently. In his heyday, he worked over 30 events every year and deployed up to five trailers with staffing at each.

“But I don’t work near as hard as I used to,” he says. “After 50 years, I think I’ve earned the right to do what I want and when.” 

In a couple weeks, the fair and outdoor event season in Ohio will come to an end. 

When that happens, Puglisi will retreat to his home in Montgomery Township, where he’s surrounded by woods, farm fields, old pizza trailers, and a pond stocked with bluegill and bass.

He’ll probably think about retirement — but only fleetingly. Yes, he’s finished traveling all over and for so often. But he’s not done quite yet. 

Because people still want the pizza. 

On Friday evening at the Ashland County Fair, business hums along with the roars of tractors pulling who-knows-what, their plume of black exhaust darkening the Indian Summer sky. Kids scream with unharnessed delight, and teenage boys fish for laughs from the girls by reciting crude jokes, their prepubescent vocal chords squealing with laughter.

Meanwhile, a high school classmate of Puglisi’s chews on a slice of pizza.

“Not skimpy on the toppings,” she says. 

Her devotion to what she calls “the best pizza at the fair” began 50 years prior, when Puglisi first began selling pizza from his own trailer. It’s become a tradition for this longtime fairgoer, on par with watching tractor pulls and farm animals and children donning blue ribbons and boots. 

“I’m in the winter of my life,” she says, tears in her eyes as she takes in the sights of the fair. 

“This — it’s home. It feels like home,” she says. 

And she takes another bite of her friend’s pizza.