My father was Italian – I know what W.O.P. means, many people do not. For 88 years an Italian-owned restaurant in Louisville has sold the Wopburger which is a sausage patty with some sort of special sauce made by the restaurant.

As controversies go, this one isn’t exactly a whopper. It’s more of a – well, let’s just say it’s about a wopburger and what happens when the menu at an iconic Louisville restaurant collides with ethnic sensibilities and political correctness in the 21st century.

And, essentially, what happens is the icon blinks first. Which is why the menu at the Blue Parrot restaurant will soon offer an “Italian burger” instead of a you-know-what burger.

How, you ask, could something as benign – to say nothing of tasty – as a “sausage patty with melted cheese served with sauce” ignite an ethnic flap? Well . . .

It all began about 1919, when Michael and Emira Colacci, fresh from Campobasso, Italy, decided that opening a restaurant in Louisville made sense. A place for coal miners – of which Michael was one – to eat, to be comfortable around fellow paisanos.

The you-know-what burger’s name wasn’t an ethnic slur. It was, Michael and Emira’s granddaughter would insist 88 years later, “A nickname. It just meant they were Italian, proud to be Italian.”

My great grandfather came to this country to work in the coal mines of West Virginia. He was considered a WOP. What does WOP mean? With out papers; no legal documents to prove who you are. The story I’m told is our last name was misspelled by some dumbass Frenchman that couldn’t spell and turned Turchetti into Turkette. It stuck.

At least that’s what Michael and Emira thought. At least that’s what their son Joe and their grandchildren Joan and Richard thought. And, apparently, it’s what generations of locals like Chuck Scarpella thought.

Scarpella, former head of the Louisville Society of Italian Americans, says the you-know- what burger had “been there all my life. My grandma worked in the Blue Parrot. My mom worked there, I worked there, my kids worked there. It’s never been offensive.”

I guess most Italian’s are thick skinned. I know it doesn’t bother me and I’m very proud of my heritage. So about a month ago this east coast idiot Italian-American named James Gambino was at the restaurant and saw the WOPBURGER on the menu and gave the owners a load of crap over it and demanded it be taken off the menu. The owners laughed at him – good for them.

Then the April 13 letter from the Washington, D.C.-based National Italian American Foundation arrived. The one in which NIAF Chairman Dr. A. Kenneth Ciongoli wrote he was “alarmed to learn” of the you-know-what burger being on the menu. “Perhaps you are not aware that this is a pejorative term that insults the Italian American community,” he added.

No way, thought Riggins, to Ciongoli’s renaming suggestion. “This is our business.” Apparently, the Boulder Valley School District didn’t agree.

Gambino, who complained to the NIAF, also took his case to the school district, which, it seems, had been happily buying Blue Parrot sauce for 10 years and using it in its lunch program.

“We love using the product,” says Linda Stoll, director of food services for the school district. “It’s 100 percent natural, exactly the kind of product we want.”

When Stoll learned the Blue Parrot had a you-know-what burger on its menu, she called Richard Colacci, a restaurant owner and boss of the sauce operation.

So they were held up by a political correctard (read:leftard). It’s now called the Italian Burger. Look out Burger King, Gambino may have a issue with the term “WHOPPER”.

Complete story on the Wopburger from Rocky Mtn News

Goombah out.

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