When Eating Out First Came In

Today’s posting is dedicated to my grandson, Eamonn, who turns four years old this week. If he’s like his mom, someday he’s going to want to know what it was like to be a kid back “in olden times.” He may not believe that someone could grow up never having clambered around in Playland at Mickey D’s or eaten a Happy Meal (with a Transformer toy in it) —not that he gets to do that very often himself.

Once, a long time ago, when Gram was a teenager, there was nothing called “fast food” or “super size” or “McNuggets.” Cars didn’t have cup holders, and food scientists hadn’t gotten busy creating finger foods that required no utensils to eat them straight from their wrappings. In fact, in the 1950s we didn’t eat away from home much at all.

But the first time I did, I dined elegantly, like a princess. In 1946, my mom took me on a train trip from Pittsburgh to New York City to see my new baby cousin. We ate in a Pennsylvania Railroad dining car. It would have passed muster with Sir Topham Hatt [for those who don’t follow the adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine and his Friend, Sir Topham is CEO]. There were snowy white linens, silver-plated sugar bowls, and extremely attentive black waiters serving carefully prepared food.

During our NYC stay, my aunt took us for lunch to Horn & Hardart, the automat that didn’t exist back home. We selected our lunch from a wall of glass windows. You put some nickels in the slot, slid open the window, and removed a sandwich, salad, or piece of pie, whatever you chose. The windows were filled from the kitchen behind the wall, and everything was freshly made and more appealing than what we extract from vending machines nowadays. In the 50’s, vending machines usually held bottles of coke, “Refreshment the whole world prefers” was the 1958 slogan. But, I digress…

Perhaps the ambiance of the dining car was why someone got the idea back in the 1920s of turning obsolete dining cars into diners, small short-order eateries. After World War II, as the economy returned to civilian production and the suburbs boomed, diners spread beyond the eastern seaboard cities along suburban highways. They frequently had stainless steel interiors, large windows, and booths. The grill, on which most of the cooking was done, was behind a long counter. The sassy wait staff was responsible for a whole new lingo for common foods. For example, BLT, mayo, the blue plate special, Joe, OJ, over easy, hashed browns, cackleberries (eggs), sunny side up, sinkers (donuts), Zeppelins in a fog (sausages and mashed potato), graveyard stew (my grandma’s cure for everything, it was white toast sprinkled with cinnamon sugar sitting in warm milk). “Pittsburgh” was even used as an adjective to tell the cook to char the meat on the outside while leaving it red in the middle, just like Jones & Laughlin at night. Eberhart’s out in Wexford is the one diner I remember. The specialty was chicken-in-the-basket with French fries. Deep fried, of course. Cole slaw was as close to a green vegetable as it got. That was where my parents might eat out on a special occasion when I was just a kid.

The North Hills Develops

More restaurants opened in the North Hills as the population grew. Among the better known were Pat McBride's, McSorleys, Rebel’s Corners, Carmody’s, Tu-Deck’s, Dolly’s, and Pine Valley (where baseball banquets were held). There must have been some spaghetti places (Flamgletti’s, Baldini’s [right]), but not many ethnic places ventured our way. I don’t believe my dad’s and Uncle Cy Logan’s favorite tavern, The Fox Trot Inn (near the intersection of Perry Highway and Ingomar Road), served pub grub as it does now. When Cy died in 1975, Mother asked the brothers who then owned and tended bar at the Fox Trot to serve as his pallbearers—a nice touch I thought.

An odd place on Route 19 in Wexford was The Convict Inn, which probably folded by 1958, lacking a faithful clientele (of lifers). The most notable feature of this restaurant was a line of inmates in horizontal black and white bee-striped prison uniforms marching along the roof ridge. Inside the jail theme continued with cells, iron bars, opened shackles, and tin serving plates. It was the decor, rather than the food (what besides bread and water?), that I remember from my only visit. Who could have dreamed up such a depressing, unappetizing joint! Much more popular was the Howard Johnson's that appeared in the vicinity somewhat later.

Generally eating out was just stopping somewhere for ice cream—Raupp’s or Taylor’s (left) on Kummer Road at the edge of North Park, Isaly’s on McKnight Road, and Tastee Freez on Perry Highway. Frozen custard and soft-serve variants were also available. The obelisks of homemade vanilla ice cream balanced on the top of waffle cones were dished up by Martha Raupp. (She was the stern wife of Frank, McCandless’ lone police officer in the 1940’s, who used to bring small boxes of candy each Christmas to us Ingomar School kids). What made the Raupp’s ice cream particularly memorable was the dexterity required to eat it without having it topple off the cone and into the cinders in the parking lot outside their store! Again, I digress.

By the time I turned 15 and started cruising around in cars with boys, drive-in restaurants with curb service sprang up on Routes 8 and 19, and McKnight Road. I remember the first McDonald’s meal I ate when the golden arches appeared on McKnight Road. The burger was not much bigger than the quarter it cost and came on a large bun with two pre-assigned blobs of mustard and ketchup. Period. The little sack of French fries and the thick milkshake were much better.

My memory gets fuzzy here, but I think the McDonald franchise became Delney’s (for the partners, Delligatti and Sweeney—no relative) and moved farther north on McKnight Road. I believe both partners had NAHS teenagers, who were younger than us. It was a popular spot for North Alleghenians of my era to stop after sports events, movies, and Community Center dances. We went not because the food was “fast,” but because it was a place to sit in a darkened car with our dates (and not have the McCandless police shining their flashlights into the window). According to the McDonald website, the Big Mac (not offered “system-wide” until 1968) was “the brainchild of Jim Delligatti, one of Ray Kroc's earliest franchisees, who by the late 1960s operated a dozen stores in Pittsburgh.” I’m impressed!

But in 1958, Big Macs as well as most of today’s fast food franchises were unknown. Although Dairy Queen went national right after WWII (1947) to be followed by Colonel Sander’s KFC in 1952, and McDonald’s in 1954, Burger King didn’t expand beyond Miami until 1958, the same year as I-HOP. Pizza Hut and Subway developed in the 1960s, and Dave Thomas opened the first Wendy’s in Columbus in 1969.

My favorite was always Eat ’n Park, a mostly Pennsylvania chain that started in the South Hills in 1949 and came to McKnight Road in the 50s. Among its claims to fame were the carhops and the Big Boy hamburgers, which had a particularly good sauce, similar to Russian salad dressing.

In 2005, I was flummoxed when visiting the art museum at the University of Iowa to round a corner and find a 12-foot Big Boy statue in the Sculpture Court. The adjacent plaque described it as “a monumental found-art sculpture by John Freyer”. Huh? Freyer caused a stir back then when his master’s thesis (later a book) was a performance art project. He sold all his earthy belongings on eBay (including an opened box of taco shells, half a bottle of mouthwash, almost all of his clothes, and, his sideburns), then talked about it on NPR and wrote a book, All My Life for Sale. Freyer successfully conned the U of I Museum into buying this piece of fiberglass. As a curator said in an interview in for school newspaper, The Daily Iowan, “There may be those who question the object’s validity…. The exhibit aims to provoke people to question their presumptions of art, creating a dialogue between artist and viewer about the eternal artistic question: What is art anyway?”

Which reminds me of Professor Harold Hill, The Music Man (mentioned in my posting of June 28), who gulled a different group of Iowans. And, dear Eamonn, it suggests that you need to hear Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Note: I would appreciate any corrections/additions concerning North Hills’ eateries since my recollections have come from my memory without written sources backing them. Special thanks go to Anita "Doll" Bauer (Bill’s mom) for contributing names of most of the restaurants.