Duxbury Pizza defies power outage

Despite howling winds, massive power outages and blizzard conditions, one Duxbury business stayed open throughout Blizzard 2013, welcoming neighbors and adventurous residents.

After closing early on Friday afternoon to let employees get home before the statewide driving ban went into effect, Duxbury Pizza owner Eric Giumetti trekked through the snow at 7:30 Saturday morning to the pizza shop on Standish St. to check out the impact of snowstorm “Nemo.”

Giumetti woke up Saturday morning to find a neighbor’s tree had fallen on his truck, so he trekked up to the pizza parlor to make breakfast for his family and to start shovelling. Thankfully, Giumetti’s father-in-law and previous owner of the store, Louis Themistokleous, installed a generator at the shop last year, after years of losing power and, subsequently, business.

Themistokelous, Giumetti, his wife Cattina and their two kids decided to open up the pizza shop Saturday morning and reached out the residents via social media. Those employees who were able to make it out of their homes also came in to help out.

“My kids are in high school, so when they tweeted that we were open, it reached a large number of people,” Giumetti said. “Duxbury Football retweeted it out and reached an even bigger following.”

Throughout the day on Saturday, the family ran a balancing act between listening to storm stories from residents and trying to feed them. Giumetti said parents came in to warm up and get some food, while children used the shop’s outlets to charge their cell phones.

“If kids don’t have their cell phones, forget about it,” he said.

On Twitter, patrons expressed their gratitude to Duxbury Pizza for staying open and offering food, electricity and a place to warm up.

Looking out the window of the shop on Monday morning, Giumetti said he was still the only shop he could see that was open.

“Having the generator has been great,” he said. “We’ve been able to help out of lot of people in town; for a while we were basically feeding Duxbury.”