Root Beer Memories

When I was a kid, we never ate out. Not as a family. I'm not sure why. Money probably. Also, for many of my growing up years, my mother was not comfortable outside of our house and yard. The exceptions to this were events at her mother's house across town and attending church, but even church was uncomfortable for her for some years. This was never spoken of in our family. It was just how things were.

I saw the kids next door pile into their old Chevy in the 1950's to go to one of several of their favorite restaurants. In the summer it was drive-ins. In the winter it was various local cafes. My experience with restaurants was limited since we didn't own a car. I saw several cafes on my walks around town. Little holes in the wall they were mostly, and blue plate special lunch counters at the drugstore or dime stores or taverns.

Franchising was just getting a toe hold in America after WWII. We had a Spud Nut Shop in Valpo, but at the time that was it. Mostly we had places like the small locally owned  Waffle Shop, but there were also fancier sit down places like Marie's Restaurant and Strongbow's and the Hotel Lembke that were simply unimaginable to a gypsy like me. This was life pre-television so I had absolutely no frame of reference for such places.

On Saturdays when I took my escape treks to the public library and the general downtown area, I always walked slowly past the Hotel Lembke and inhaled deeply as I approached the restaurant kitchen exhaust vent on Lafayette Street. What is it about the smell of hot grease meeting fresh air that makes one ravenous? 

I didn't have a clue what was on the menu at the hotel. To be honest, at ten years of age, I didn't know such things as menus existed, but I knew what smelled good and that grease smelled wonderful. It was lucky for me that Harvey's was right across the alley from the Lembke because once I started salivating, I had to have something, and I usually trotted through the side door of the dime store to the candy and nuts counter for a quick fix.

On Sundays, we usually walked to church which was in the heart of the downtown, and afterwards we often saw people we knew walking into the Lembke for what I knew in my heart had to be a scrumptious Sunday dinner. A few times I asked my parents if we could eat there, too. I was told that it was wrong to work on Sunday. When I explained that eating wasn't work for me, I was informed that the people who had to cook and serve the food were working and if we ordered food from them, we were making them work which was just as wrong. When I argued that the Coopers, who were highly respected members of our church, had just that minute gone into the Lembke, I received a hard thwap on the head for my logic.

To eat in a real restaurant became for me a kind of quest. When kids at school said they'd been to a fish fry at Lake Eliza, I made a mental note that Lake Eliza had fish. When someone said that such and such restaurant had this or that, I filed it away just in case someday I might actually get to go to that place. These eatery names became neon signs in my head , beckoning me to come to visit them, to explore what they had to offer, to eat, drink, and be merry. But none of them was ever more appealing to me as a ten year old than the local A & W Root Beer Stand.

Mary Rita Lyons owned the A & W Root Beer Stand on the west side of town. It was small as most places like that used to be, and it stood on a corner, easily accessible to both driver and pedestrian. If you drove up, you were immediately greeted by a teenaged girl in cap, apron,  white shirt and black shorts who asked you what you wanted. In a jiffy, your food was brought out to you on a metal tray that attached to your slightly raised car window where you ate in a kind of post WWII al fresco experience. If you were on foot, you could seat yourself on one of several plain metal stools at a counter attached to the side of the stand. It was a busy place on hot summer days catering to workers at lunch time, students from the nearby high school who were getting out of summer school classes, and lots of neighborhood kids who just loved root beer.

I discovered the A & W the same year that my older sister got her first job working there as a car hop. She was fourteen and I was ten. She worked evenings, and I showed up any time before that so she couldn't tell my mother I'd been there. For a kid who had dreamed of restaurant food since she was five, this was a little bit of heaven.

Mary Rita, as everyone called her,sold the usual root beer stand stuff. Root beer served in frosty mugs, root beer floats, hot dogs, and chips. But that's where any similarity to other shops ended because Mary Rita had two items that made her A & W stand out. First and most simply was her frozen candy bars. Just the usual...Snickers, Milky Way, Three Muskateers, and Hershey Bars, but once frozen they became something unspeakably refreshing on a hot Indiana day. They were cheap, fast, and they hit the spot, and the fact that I could have one in the five minutes it took me to ride my bike from my front door to hers spoke volumes to me. 

But the other unique offering at Mary Rita's was her mexiburger. The mexiburger was a sloppy joe made from her own secret recipe. Rumor had it that it had been handed down from her mother who had created it herself. It could have been handed down from Mt. Olympus it was that good. Fifty years later, I can still remember it in detail. Made with premium lean ground beef (from Ruge Meats, a locally excellent butcher shop) and tomato sauce and spices, it's unique ingredient always baffled me: sesame seeds. I don't know what they added except perhaps mystery and a slight nutty taste and some texture. All of the ingredients were cooked for a very long time because the meat had a consistency more in line with well cooked roast beef than quickly cooked ground beef, and when  served on a steamed hot dog bun, it was perfect. 

A mexiburger cost twenty-five cents. A mexidog, which was a hot dog smothered in the mexiburger mixture, was thirty-five cents. A frosty mug of A & W was fifteen cents. You do the math. It was cheap even for the 1950's and it was like nothing my mother ever made for dinner.

My mother had a thing about people eating out that I never understood. She told my father any time he left the house, "Now, don't you do gedunking!" She used that word to refer to eating anything she hadn't cooked herself. That limited all of us, but I'm sure may father, who also loved to eat, must have found his own ways of grabbing a burger or a fried egg sandwich or a hot dog or two that she didn't know about. I always thought it stood to reason that he must have had some goodies on the sly since she reminded him every single time he left the house not to.

But no amount of admonishing could take me away from my root beer stand love affair. It was meant to be. My soul needed that root beer to survive. And all these years later, I can see the ten year old me hopping on my rusty, balloon-tired old Schwinn bike on a sultry summer's day, racing down west Chicago Street towards the A &W, all the way anticipating in my mind the sweet fragrance of the exhaust vent, the softness of the steamed buns, hopping onto a hard metal stool and placing my order, and then experiencing the wonder and delight of Mary Rita's wonderful mexiburgers. And for those brief moments in my childhood, life was good and perfect