No one would dare say that Table Talk Pies invented the four-inch pie, but the company certainly perfected it. Nicely priced, at around a dollar, and ideally sized—comfortable in the hand, easily slipped into a coat pocket, affording the sensual thrill of eating an entire pie but being modest enough not to make you feel gross for doing it—Table Talk’s four-inch pies have dominated the stack of last-minute purchases by cash registers in American mini-marts and bodegas for decades. At last count, two hundred and fifty million of the cheery little red-and-white boxes are purchased per year.
Theodore Tonna and Angelo Cotsidas emigrated from Greece in the early nineteen-tens and started the baking company in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1924. They chose the name Table Talk because it had Tonna’s initials, and because they pictured making products that brought a family together, around a table, to share a piece of something sweet. In the beginning, Table Talk baked goods were delivered to stores by horse-drawn wagons. Five years later, the Depression flattened scores of small businesses, but Table Talk managed to rise. This was probably on account of Tonna and Cotsidas’s deciding to focus on pies, and managing to sell a hearty number of them to diners across the Northeast, many of which were run by Greek immigrants like themselves. Also, around that same time, the company won a large contract with the Army at nearby Fort Devens—soldiers, evidently, liked to eat a lot of pie.
If the world were a different place, Mary Tonna (1927-2021), the eldest of Theodore’s seven children, who was smart, determined, and strong-minded, would have been the natural choice to run the company when it passed to the next generation. She had grown up as part of Table Talk. When she was ten years old, she was assigned to walk the day’s cash to the bank as one of her chores. But Theodore Tonna wouldn’t hear of a girl running a company, so Mary stayed the usual feminine course of the era. After a year of college, she left school and got married. Her husband, Christo Cocaine, was also the son of Greek immigrants. (His father was born Aristedis Kokkinis, but family legend has it that some clerk at Ellis Island had a big laugh when he announced to the young man that his American name would be Harry Cocaine.) Soon, Christo went to work for Table Talk, loading boxes of pies into delivery trucks. Mary had three children. In 1960, Christo became the general manager of the company.
Mary would not, however, be completely thwarted. She decided to go back to college in her late forties, bearing up under the awkwardness of being several decades older than her fellow-students, and graduated with a B.A., in 1977, when she was fifty. She got a master’s degree in education a few years later. She taught school, served as a docent and a trustee at the Worcester Art Museum, sang in the church choir, did charitable work. She trained her children to be Table Talk pie tasters. And, even though her father never officially condoned it, she remained involved with the company, a minister without portfolio, until 2016, when, at age eighty-nine, she was named the chair of the board.
There was a time when Table Talk considered moving out of Worcester. Not to draw too close a parallel to Mary Tonna Cocaine’s life, but, like Mary, the city had been denied its due. In 1965, when the Massachusetts Turnpike opened, its path had one glaring oddity. Instead of going through Worcester, the second-largest city in the state and the obvious next stop after Boston, the highway bypassed it, squashing its growth. Rumor attributes this slight to political squabbling and, in particular, to fear among Boston big shots that if Worcester were well situated on the Pike it might eventually surpass their city in size and power. Mary was a Worcester booster, and she was instrumental in the company’s decision to stay put. In 2017, Table Talk cut the ribbon on a new building in Worcester, and Mary, who was then ninety, gave a speech urging all those in attendance to renew their devotion to the city.
Mary’s son Harry is now the president and general manager of Table Talk Pies. After years of being teased for his last name (“I got tired of getting calls late at night to come to parties, or people asking me how much I weighed,” he said recently), he changed it from Cocaine back to the family’s original name, Kokkinis. He is convinced that his mother could have run the company well, and that it was just her misfortune to have been born at a time when such a thing wasn’t usual. Still, the experience didn’t sour her. “She loved pies,” Kokkinis said. “Oh, and her baklava was the best.”
Afterword is an obituary column that pays homage to people, places, and things we’ve lost. If you’d like to propose a subject for an Afterword piece, write to us at afterword@newyorker.com.
