When 101-year-old Betty Probst died this past December, her daughter Debbie Hager did the only honorable thing to send her off. She took her out for pizza.
After the funeral, Tammie Shelton Brown, Pizza Palace’s longest-running employee, draped one of Hager’s mother’s sweaters over the chair the family matriarch sat in for 40 years. A bouquet of roses sat where a hamburger steak, her favorite dish, used to be. Generations of customers — parents who were eager to try a new restaurant in 1983, their children who remained loyal into adulthood and their children who will likely do the same — gathered around the table that Debbie Hager and her husband, Wayne, shared hundreds of times with her mother. At this family meal, they were celebrating a life so devoted to this pizza joint on Hope Mills Road.
The late Tom Poulos opened Pizza Palace’s second and most prominent location at the corner of Raeford Road and Hope Mills Road in 1983. The original Pizza Palace, founded by Tom and his late brother Pete Poulos, dated to the 1960s at the corner of Eastern Boulevard and Grove Street. That location closed around 2011, not long before Pete Poulos died…