Italian American Club of Jacksonville members preparing a spaghetti dinner. They refused to reveal any details of the house recipe for meatballs and sauce | Hanna Raskin
Published on September 29, 2026 at 1:00 pm
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One board member of the Italian American Club of Jacksonville is half Polish. Another is half Irish.
Regulars at the social club’s monthly spaghetti sale are of equally heterogenous heritage. Paul Neuendorf, who years ago earned early entry privileges by reliably showing up well in advance of the takeout supper’s 5 p.m. start, is half German.
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“My wife and I love Italian food,” said Neuendorf, who lives about a mile from the squat white clubhouse in Mandarin. He always buys one $13 box of pasta, garlic bread, and a couple of whiffleball-sized meatballs for the two of them to share. “The sauce is absolutely fabulous, and the spaghetti is cooked just right.”
As Jane Pierce, another longtime customer, puts it, “It’s my favorite Friday of the month. I’m not Italian, but I love spaghetti. Americans love spaghetti.”
Pierce’s impression of her countrymen’s pasta preferences is sound. On average, Americans each eat about 20 pounds of pasta every year, and spaghetti is consistently named in surveys as an all-time favorite pasta shape. But the crowd that typically takes no more than an hour to buy up the Italian American Club’s 250 dinners isn’t dominated by people who think of sauced spaghetti as a geographically nonspecific food.
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Rather, the meatballs seasoned, shaped, and baked by a crew of 10 volunteers take their fans right back to Northeast Ohio.
“You don’t realize how many people live in Youngstown until you come to Jacksonville,” said Youngstown native Kathleen Pesa Maley, an Italian American Club member who mans the cannoli table. (Maley is of Croatian ancestry, but her husband has Italian roots.)
While the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t track relocations from greater Cleveland to Jacksonville, data show Florida annually gains about 20,000 Ohioans. Because so many Italians immigrated to that state at the turn of the 20th century to work in coal mines and steel mills concentrated around Lake Erie, its culinary profile was shaped by fundraising dinners and festivals there, sponsored by the community’s fraternal halls, churches and schools. In other words, even Northeast Ohio residents with no familial connection to Italy have childhood memories of canned pepper contests and biscotti cookoffs.
Across the region, Italian American War Veterans posts are so woven into social life that Florida’s new arrivals from Ohio are initially confounded by the lack of “ITAM”’s, as the popular watering holes are generally known.
“I was like, ‘What’s an IAC?’” Maley recalled.
Jacksonville’s Italian American Club was formed in 1933, although the original group disbanded during World War II in a show of American patriotism, following a run of wiener roasts, Bunco parties and beauty pageants. The Jax organization relaunched in 1951, meaning its upcoming Festa Italiana on Oct. 24 — the biggest event on the club’s annual calendar, and occasion for a major meatball-making session — will double as a 75th anniversary party.
“Up in New York and New Jersey, they had ethnic neighborhoods and everyone spoke Italian,” then-club treasurer Lucy Cortese, whose parents were among the club’s founders, told The Florida Times-Union in 2016. “I remember growing up in the Westside [of Jacksonville] and nobody could pronounce my name and they’d ask me, ‘Why do your parents talk funny?’”
According to Cortese, immigrants and their children rediscovered the feeling of home when they got together with club members to dance or sing. “My parents were Italian immigrants, and I wanted to share my heritage with my children and grandchildren,” says Vinny Russo, who joined the club after relocating from Brooklyn in the 1980s.
As best as club members can recall, Russo and his peers developed the current Spaghetti-to-Go model, which helps fund IAC activities. “Vinnie was a very active member,” Madaline Gagliano said as she waited in the clubhouse kitchen for the ordering rush to start. “All those great, highly intelligent men…I’m one of the few of the old group.”
Another long-timer is club President Joe Farina, who recently led the charge to buy a $5,000 pasta cooker, which struck him as a safer alternative to the propane tanks and basins of boiling water that octogenarian volunteers were overseeing. Set up on a back patio for spaghetti night, the stainless-steel machine turns out 10 pounds of cooked noodles in 10 minutes. Farina noted that few restaurants are equipped with such a futuristic way to produce pasta. “My son works in Ponte Vedra, and he said, ‘Dad, they just have pots.’”
At least some of that spaghetti ended up in a Styrofoam box purchased by Brian Prior, who two years ago moved to Jacksonville from Youngstown. He was ecstatic to have discovered the club.
“This reminds me of Mount Carmel spaghetti dinners,” he said, citing a Youngstown tradition so cherished that Our Lady of Mount Carmel Basilica now jars and sells its sauce. “It’s got love and soul cooked into it.”
He met Maley when he added cannoli to his haul, and the two immediately started chatting about shared friends, classmates and relatives. Before long, Prior got curious about the club. “I’m Hungarian, not even Italian,” he admitted. “But I used to belong to the ITAM.”
Looking around, he asked, “Do you have a bar?”
Prior left with a membership form.
The Italian American Club of Jacksonville is located at 2838 Westberry Road. Information on upcoming events can be found on their Facebook page.
