For one Sunday every October, the main station of the Ceredo Volunteer Fire Department smells less like diesel and turnout gear and more like a Sunday gravy simmering in Clarksburg. On Oct. 25, the department holds its 26th annual Sunday Dinner with Rocco, the long-running fundraiser built around restaurateur Rocco Muriale and his spaghetti. Plates go out from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. at the station at 700 B Street in Ceredo.
The menu is deliberately short: Rocco's spaghetti, bread and dessert. A standard dinner is $8. For $10, diners can sit down and get the same meal plus salad and a drink. Seating is limited, so organizers also offer drive-thru, walk-up and delivery. Proceeds go toward improving emergency services.
"We are pleased to team up with Rocco for the annual Sunday Dinner," Juanita Wilson, the department's EMS director, said in a release announcing the event. "Rocco's culinary skills are legendary in the Tri-State. This is a wonderful opportunity to enjoy a Rocco's spaghetti dinner and benefit the Ceredo Volunteer Fire Department."
That phrase, legendary in the Tri-State, is not just fundraiser boilerplate. Muriale's restaurant, Rocco's Ristorante, sits a short drive away at 252 Main Street in Ceredo, and it has been feeding this corner of Wayne County for nearly half a century. The restaurant's own account puts it at "nearly 50 years of business," and the Muriale family's food business has grown well beyond the dining room: Rocco's Specialty Foods, owned by the same family, sells Rocco's frozen products, and the restaurant's fans include regulars who order his meals out of grocery-store freezers as well as off the menu.
Muriale's story starts not in Ceredo but in north-central West Virginia. He was born Rocco Sam Muriale on Dec. 14, 1946, in Clarksburg, the only child of Sam R. Muriale and Rose A. Vilone. He grew up in Kelly Hill, a four-block neighborhood of Clarksburg known for its dense Italian-American culture, and he credits that neighborhood, more than himself, for everything that came later. On the restaurant's website he writes that when diners sit in his dining rooms, "you are looking not at what I have done but what all the great people in my life have done for me." He lists them by name, dozens of them, calling them "ordinary people with extraordinary gifts."
The family's restaurant tradition began in 1969, when Muriale's parents, Frank and Violet Muriale, opened Muriale's with his uncle Sam and aunt Rose, according to the history published by Muriale's Italian Kitchen in Fairmont. Rocco eventually built his own name in the southern part of the state, and in late 2021 he handed Muriale's in Fairmont to Scott and Jennifer Duarte, staying involved at the restaurant while the new owners carried on the recipes. The Ceredo operation remained his.
By the time the fire department came calling, then, Rocco's was already an institution. The department's annual dinner has become one of those small-town events that outlasts the people who started it. Twenty-six years is a long run for any fundraiser, and longer still for one built on a single restaurateur's willingness to show up and cook. Past coverage of the dinner shows the department packing the hall and serving Rocco's spaghetti to a steady stream of neighbors; in one earlier year, Ceredo Fire Marshal Dave Caudill told a television crew that for $5 "you get a Rocco's dinner, which you can't beat that deal anywhere." The price has crept up since, but the format has not changed.
The money matters. The Ceredo Volunteer Fire Department serves the municipal limits of Ceredo and surrounding areas of northern Wayne County, and according to a department release it responds to more than 1,800 emergency calls a year. Its mission statement commits the department to preserving life and property from fire and other emergencies in Ceredo, the Ceredo Rural Fire Protection District and Wayne County, and to lending assistance to neighboring towns and communities when requested, under contract or by mutual agreement. Volunteer departments in communities this size run on a mix of municipal support, grants and the kind of fundraisers that put neighbors in the same room. A spaghetti dinner is not glamorous. It is, however, reliable, and it comes with a built-in draw: people who would not necessarily turn out for a budget line item will turn out for Rocco's sauce.
That is the quiet logic of the arrangement. Muriale supplies the reputation and the recipe; the fire department supplies the hall, the volunteers and the logistics; and the community supplies the appetite. The result is a Sunday afternoon that functions as both a meal and a small civic ritual, one where the person handing you a plate of spaghetti may also be the person who would respond if your house caught fire.
The 26th edition runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Oct. 25 at the main station, 700 B Street, Ceredo. Dinners are $8 for the standard meal and $10 for a sit-down meal with salad and a drink. Seating is limited, and drive-thru, walk-up and delivery are available. Proceeds benefit emergency services in Ceredo and the surrounding area.