Insects and Food

(This is an excerpt from my Memoir “Just Walk Away” which is a recollection of people, places and things.)

When I look back on my life it seems that I was always leaving something behind.

Chapter two: Insects

We had lots of picnics in the back yard and friends of the family came over for hamburgers and corn on the cob.  So did black corn beetles. They were first in line to crawl on your food as best they could so you had to pay attention when you were eating because you might chomp down on one. There were mosquitoes that bit you and chiggers that got into the crease of your skin at the waistband of your shorts and itched something fierce. If you were running barefoot in the yard you might step on a bee and then mom would scrape the stinger out and put a bread and milk poultice on your swollen and itchy foot to, according to her, suck the poison out. When it got better, she would soothe the inevitable itch with baking soda mixed into a paste with water that would get all over the place when it dried. We never learned. We went barefoot constantly.  Once I got a trip to the emergency room when, chasing lightning bugs, I tripped and fell and gashed my forearm on a broken glass bottle that was sticking out of the dirt. I was quite young, maybe five. I guess in the old days, before the subdivision was built, the Schulz’s had used the back part of our yard as a trash dump. I still have that scar on my right forearm. You could identify my dead body by it if you wanted.

Strife

My mom and dad yelled and screamed at each other in that house. You could hear them all over the neighborhood which was a source of embarrassment to me. I don’t know what they particularly argued about except I would eventually hear my mom say as my dad stomped out the back door, “Where are you going, Art?” My dad was an old-fashioned guy who thought women were there to do men’s bidding and it was none of her business where he was going. Once my dad hit our mom during an argument. I heard him slap her and I heard her crying. That was it. I’ve blocked the details out. What I do remember was that it frightened us kids very, very badly. We never knew what caused him to slap her. We knew that he had a bad temper and could get angry over the smallest things. He had zero patience. When I was quite a bit older my boss at the non-profit gave me a phrase that seemed to fit him perfectly: “Street Angel, Home Devil”. Lisa was from a Long Island, New York Italian American neighborhood, and they had many colorful phrases to describe people. Everybody outside our family loved my dad for his humor and quick wit. In our family we feared and obeyed him. Mom sometimes pushed back but was never able to prevail in getting him to be a kinder person. He was what he was, and he stayed that way. OK I admit that he could be kind. Extremely kind and thoughtful. Every year he gathered armfuls of lilacs for my mom on her May 15th birthday. Yes, he wasn’t all bad!

Mom In More Detail

As a mentioned before my mom was a very clever, smart person though insecure and frustrating. On her best days she came up with all sorts of fun things for us kids to do. On birthdays she might make it a pirate theme and have a treasure hunt complete with a map and some kind of treasure to discover. We’d dress up in pirate clothes and have a whale of a time. In the summer she dug big holes in the back yard, lined them with plastic, then filled them with water for us to splash in. On Halloween she would go all out sewing costumes. She drew us girls paper dolls with clothes to match. Then we’d cut them out of the paper and dress our paper dolls. Once an older girl named May Polley cornered me and demanded that mom make her a paper doll, too. She wanted a Cinderella doll like I had. I ran home terrified and in tears. Mom made the paper doll, which I then gave to May and she never bothered me again. Maybe it was a lesson in giving in to bullies or maybe it was a lesson in picking your battles. In the picture you can see the little tabs on the side of the “dress”. Those tabs are meant to be folded over. They aren’t some weird appendages. The tabs were integral to the dress because when they were folded over, they kept the dress on the doll. It was really good fun dressing the dolls.

My mom had time to do all this stuff because she never worked outside the house. It was a time of prosperity in America after World War II, and we could get along on my dad’s salary, but we weren’t flush with cash or rich by any means. We lived a frugal life without extreme penny pinching. Now and then I would ask mom how come we can’t have this or that, like some neighbor kids had, and mom would always say something like it’s because we spend our money on insurance and those people don’t have any. Yes, she said this and I never knew if it was true, but I accepted it as a reasonable answer. We didn’t live a life of luxury or privilege, but we had what we needed.

Food

This is a Big Section because food is important to people in the Midwest, and we were no different.

I say important because invariably upon finishing breakfast mom and dad would be discussing what they were going to have for lunch. After lunch they would then be discussing what they were going to have for dinner. It was like that.

The majority of our food was home cooked from scratch. Mom never bought sugary items at the grocery store, for example. I envied kids who had Sugar Pops or Frosted Flakes in their cupboards. If Mom did buy boxed cereal, which was rare, it would be Wheaties or Wheat Chex. Mostly we had the hated old-fashioned cardboard flavored oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. To make either of those tolerable we added a pat of butter, heaps of brown sugar and a little milk. We didn’t have desserts in our house except for the occasional grocery store brand Fastco ice cream that came in a square paper carton. It was always vanilla and it was terrible but at the time we didn’t know better and accepted it as tasty.  Once in a while she would come home with Neopolitan ice cream, in the Fastco box of course, which was strawberry, chocolate and vanilla in sections. It was good enough and we ate it.

Some lucky kids had fudgsicles in their freezers and, boy, did I envy those kids! Mom considered these specialty or exotic items, and we never had any. The most daring thing mom got were the almond windmill cookies from Archway which were also known as Dutch Speckulaas. They were ginger flavored mostly and there were little bits of almonds in them. They were in the shape of, you guessed it, windmills. While we’re on the subject of cookies, once I came home from school and my mom was not home. I must have been 8 or 9. When I looked in the cupboard for a snack, I saw some boxed coconut cookies covered with chocolate and caramel. What is this? Why are these here? This is very strange and completely out of the ordinary! I was terrified to eat one, this is how rare this was. I thought, “Maybe they were put there by bad guys and they’re poisoned, and they want me to eat one, so I’ll die.” I closed the cupboard and walked away even though they looked incredibly good. Then I obsessed and obsessed about them but kept my composure. I kept going to the cupboard to check if they were still there. Eventually mom came home, and they turned out to be legit. They were Keebler Coconut Dreams cookies and a friend had given them to her.

When I got older, I was glad that we never had many sweets. I think that having very little sugar helped me have good teeth and not get overweight. As a matter of fact, unlike everyone I knew I absolutely loved going to the dentist. Dr. Warrington would come in the exam room, take one look in my mouth and exclaim, “You have such beautiful teeth!” I was a vain young child easily overcome by flattery, but it was true. My teeth were straight, and I didn’t have any cavities. I never had to endure the agony of braces like many of my friends. I even had the added advantage of having a little gap in my front teeth that I could squirt water out of to annoy my friends at the swimming pool. Later on, the gap closed and this was perfect because it helped my teeth to stay straight. Room to move, you see. Sigh. Such a perfect child!

It’s not that we didn’t have our indulgences. Near 15^th Avenue there was a small grocery store with a bakery in the back. It was around the corner of Fifteenth Avenue and down the street on Nevada (Nuh-Vay-Duh not Nuh-Vah-Duh. Remember this is Iowa!) where we would buy frozen Snickers bars and Slo-Pokes in the summer. They also had the best white bread baked in their own ovens.  One of my favorite snacks was two huge slices of that bread with as much Miracle Whip as possible slathered on it so it skooshed out of the sides when you pressed down. Only Miracle Whip. Nothing else. Not mayonnaise. Nothing. I would lick off the skooshed out Miracle Whip that I loved so much. I’ve found that people who are not from Iowa or the Midwest don’t understand the attraction of Miracle Whip. Everybody in the Midwest uses Miracle Whip. It is an ingredient in just about every recipe you can think of. Deviled eggs don’t taste right without it. Turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving don’t taste right without it. Potato salad doesn’t taste right without it. Coleslaw doesn’t taste right without it. Waldorf salad doesn’t taste right without it. Macaroni salad doesn’t taste right without it. I like mayonnaise now but when I was young it had to be Miracle Whip.

We also fried bologna to put in a sandwich and ate hot dogs raw and uncooked. My brother lived on Franco American spaghetti out of a can or Campbell’s tomato soup with half a package of saltines crushed in it. On Sunday mornings we had pancake eating contests while my dad flipped pancakes as fast as we could eat them. “Who wants another pancake?” he would yell out. “Me!” we would yell back. These were silver dollar sized pancakes mind you. Not the ginormous restaurant size. You could eat a lot of silver dollar sized pancakes.

On Sunday night mom made Swiss Steak cooked in the pressure cooker and served with mashed potatoes. She’d get a cheap cut of steak and pound the heck out of it with a meat mallet, so a lot of flour was mashed into it. Then she would chop carrots and onions and pour a can of chopped tomatoes in on top of the meat in the pressure cooker. Then we watch in fascination and fear as the little bobble thing on top of the pressure cooker would let off steam. Would it explode, or wouldn’t it? We never knew but it never did.

When it was all done, we would pile a mountain of mashed potatoes on our plates and then put a big piece of tenderized meat on top with the gravy over. You could eat the meat with a fork it was so tender. My lifelong enjoyment of liver and onions also began here. I don’t know how my mom made it, but it was never dry and chalky. Of course, we drowned it in ketchup. And, oh, the onions! You had to have a mound of pan-fried onions, slightly caramelized on the whole she-bang. Sometimes she made what she called Neopolitan spaghetti which other people call American Goulash. This was cooked macaroni noodles in a sauce of hamburger and canned tomatoes all mixed up. This, too, was high eatin’!

When we went out to eat, which was not often, we had some choices and one of the choices was a café near the Third Avenue bridge that had a bar in the front and a restaurant in the back. It was kind of seedy but we didn’t care. Their signature dish was a dinner plate size pork fritter with French fries. The bun was this ridiculous looking tiny thing in the middle of the giant pork fritter which had a couple of dill pickle slices and a dollop of yellow mustard.  The fritter itself was pounded wafer thin, breaded and deep fried. You would eat your way to the bun and, boy, did we love it!

The other treat was the Maid Rite sandwich. When I was older Hilary Clinton came to Marshalltown on a campaign tour and the first thing out of her mouth was the announcement that she had been to Taylor’s Maid Rite, and she could tell us with certainty that “They are Made Right!” Of course. Tell us something we don’t know. The Maid Rite was a white hamburger bun piled high with ground sirloin cooked until it fell apart. My sister Toni once made a very good imitation of Taylor’s secret recipe. Roseanne Barr, the comedian, called it “loose meats” and had a café in her TV series that sold them. Loose meat is a terrible name for this delicious sandwich. That makes it sound perfectly revolting. It was perfection on a bun with pickle and chopped onion and yellow mustard. NO ketchup. Ketchup had been pulled from the menu in the Great Depression because bums would come in, sit themselves down at the counter, order a cup of hot water then proceed to add a bunch of ketchup for a strange kind of soup.

To go with your Maid Rite, you had to have one of their amazing, malted milk shakes. A spoon would stand straight up if you stuck one in. It was kind of a magic taste, the Maid Rite along with a slurp of malted milk. They did not serve French fries. It was perfect just those two things. In this picture there’s ketchup so this was not a picture taken in Marshallburg unless they gave in for the Clinton. I also see French fries. We did not have these when we were kids. Verboten.

Sometimes on a hot and humid night in summer dad would say let’s go get ice cream and then we’d pile in the car to drive to a creamery in Tama (Tay-ma). We’d be driving in the dusk along highway 30 and I’d look out the window at the miles of corn fields with billions of lightning bugs flashing and wonder how there could be so much corn. I didn’t eat that much corn. Why was there so much corn? Sometimes we’d go to the Tastee Freeze south of town on highway 14 and get soft serve that was dipped upside down into chocolate and the chocolate would then harden. You’d eat a hole in the chocolate and then suck the soft serve out while your tongue was trying to keep up with all the ice cream drips down the side of the cone. John Cougar Mellancamp immortalized the Tastee Freeze in one of this songs.

On the north side of town on highway 14 was the A&W root beer stand. The car hops would come out to your car and take your order and then come back with your food and drink on a tray that attached to the side of the car. That root beer came straight from heaven. The mug had been in the freezer and the sides of the mug were frosted over. Maybe there would be a hot dog along with it, but you didn’t really need it. The root beer was outstanding all by itself. Now any other kind of root beer is pale by comparison. I even tried to make root beer once, but it didn’t taste anything like A&W. I’m spoiled for the taste of true old fashioned root beer now because Mr. Allen and Mr. Wright got the right ingredients and threw away the key in 1919.

Another summer excursion would be a trip to the outdoor drive-in to watch some cowboy movie and have terrible salty popcorn from the concession stand which, of course, I loved. We’d park next to the speaker attached by a long wire cord to a pole. Mom would take it off the holder and hook it over the door. The sound was awful but that didn’t matter. It was all part of the drive-in experience. We’d watch until we fell asleep in the back of the car and then somehow get home arrive home and wake up in our own beds the next morning.

There was only one pizza place in town at the time. Luckily it was and still is the best pizza on the planet. It rivals any pizza you can think of. Chicago pizza, New York pizza, wood fired pizza. None of them hold a candle to Zeno’s pizza. I think they used provolone instead of mozzarella and it was the cheesiest greasiest saltiest pizza on a thin crust pizza you ever had. The atmosphere was great. Everybody had their little booth, and the decor was kitchy Italian with fake grapes and flowers garlanded on the walls.

At Shady Oaks restaurant east of town on Old Highway 30 (also known as The Lincoln Highway by the way), I would always have a giant wedge of iceberg lettuce with Roquefort cheese dressing poured all over. I thought it was quite special and unique that they brought to the table those triple dispensers of salad dressing with a choice of thousand island, blue cheese and Italian dressing so you could ladle out the dressing out to your heart’s content.  It wasn’t sanitary but we didn’t think anything of it. At home we didn’t have salads. We had vegetables.

Then there was Milt’s on S. 12^th Avenue. This was a hamburger joint, but the attraction was Milt himself. We kids watched in amazement as he poured our milk into our glass going higher and higher until he was pouring it from 3 feet above the glass. When Milt retired it became a Chinese restaurant and dad would say, “Let’s go get flied lice.” He thought this was funny and didn’t realize how derogatory it was to say it that way. The food was actually pretty good. Your standard Americanized Chinese food. They had Egg Fu Yung which was smothered in some kind of beefy gravy and pork fried rice as well as Chow Mein. Not your gourmet fare but we had never had anything gourmet so we had nothing to compare it to.