One of my favorite things to do on a Saturday as a kid was to get up early enough to catch Superman and get ready for the cinema serials that would come on later that morning.  I would have my jiffy pop ready along with the Mars candy bar, two original Oscar Mayer hot dogs, back when they actually tasted like a hot dog and, last but not least, a large sour dill pickle. 

I always thought that the reason that they got their name of serials was the fact that the cereal companies would sponsor tickets for children who had collected enough box tops from their cereal to obtain a ticket to the Saturday morning movie theater serials.

I can’t remember but I believe it was on channel 13, WHBQ, and there was A show called Adventure Time with Captain Bill Killebrew who hosted the show and you could see such serials as Zorro’s Fighting Legion, Flash Gordon, Tim Tyler’s Luck, Junior G-Men of the Air, and many others.

Most of them were about fighting the NAZI saboteurs that plagued the United States in the thirties and forties serials.  I don’t think I could’ve been much more than 10 or 12 at the time. I’ve tried looking online to find something about this series that ran for quite a while on Saturday mornings.  Back in those days Saturday mornings were exclusively for us kids and most of the programs were cartoons and live action shows similar to the Mickey Mouse Club, the Banana Split Show, HR Puff’n’Stuff and others.  I personally liked the mystery shows and the story style cartoons but I never did get into the puppet style shows like the Sheri Lewis Show or others like it. It was heaven on Saturday morning to us kids who had worked hard all week long on our school assignments to actually have something special for us.

Today there are at least six different channels running 24 hours a day that have children’s programming with some of the worst animation you’ll never see.  I personally thought that Hanna Barbera had set the bar as low as it could go until such great animation and yes, I’m being facetious, Ren and Stimpy, Two Stupid Dogs, and the absolute worst Adventure Time. I know I’m an old man and I don’t see the value in making the worst art work ever put before our children.  When I look back at the cartoon shows that we had, admittedly some of them were rehashed cartoon shorts from the cinema of the thirties, forties and fifties, but at least a straight line was a straight line.  You can call this stylistic art if you wish but the problem that I have with that is it still doesn’t look like quality work, it looks like something someone threw together quickly to get it over and done with for the next day’s shooting.  Some of the watercolor backgrounds that were used in the Saturday morning cartoons of our day were used over and over for various cartoons but they were great works of art. Some of them deserve to be hung in the best art galleries out there. 

I wish I had some kind of pull with the Cartoon Network to make them realize that this stylistic and poorly done art is destroying our children’s Saturday morning, so to speak. 

I still love to sit down and watch a good cartoon when I can find one. Luckily I have a lot of the Disney shorts on DVD and a reasonable number of the cliffhanger serials also on DVD.  They bring back so many memories of our old neighborhoods, running around the old apple orchard pretending to be FBI agents chasing the gangsters that would destroy our way of life.  Those days were so, so short and there will never be a time for any of our children like that.  I remember my dad saying to me that he used to take 25¢ and go to the movie theater and watch Donald Duck marathons all day Saturday that would give him entrance and enough money for a coke and popcorn.  Wow, even in my day it was a $1.25. Admittedly, I had a large coke, large buttered popcorn and a couple of those large sour dill pickles.

Even today the media that we have still intrigues me, most of which reminds me of my childhood,

such as Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Star Wars and Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, today’s ticket prices for a family of four make it almost impossible to make it the ritual that we did, and taking a date to a movie isn’t what it used to be because of the prices. By the time you pay for the ticket, popcorn and drink and candy for each of you, you’re lucky if you haven’t spent $50.00. I feel sorry for the young couples trying to find a way to get to know each other without spending so much money and not getting in trouble. I’ve thought so much about the way movies were presented in South America in the 50’s and 60’s. Villages would get together and project the movies on a blanket from village to village. Maybe we should start that trend here all over again. What do you think?

Halloween

This is a story that I’ve only shared with my close family members and it was both painful and joyful to write. I hope you enjoy it.

My father was a good man but he had his downfalls, just like everyone else. Since his death, I have learned more about him than I did in life and I don't forget but I do forgive. He was the type of man that was one way, his way, or the highway. I have heard most people say the same thing about their fathers and, I guess, in a lot of ways it's true and, then again, it's not really true in other ways. The one thing that I wish he had never said to me was that I was stupid. Not for my sake but that of my daughter (who just graduated from college and is continuing her higher education, I'm so proud of her!!!xoxox) and my grandchildren. I have fought hard not to say that word to them but it was imbedded in my brain. I try to stop myself when I use it and say they are not stupid, it is what they did that was stupid and that they are as smart as they want to be. I will tell them why I really use that word when they are old enough to understand the whole explanation. Their Great Grandfather got most of his parenting skills in the fields where you worked or you were punished, because what was made in the field kept the family going through the coming winter.

The life that my father led was normal for most of our parents for the late 30's up to the 50's. They were in their early twenties when we came along. Not much of a break to find out who you really were, was it? I proudly tell people that I started working when I was 13 and I haven't stopped yet. Kind of hollow, don't you think, when you look at what had to be done on the farm in the 30’s and 40’s in Mississippi. Even if you played sports, you still had to come home after and do your chores after the game. The schools in those days stopped when it was harvest time and at the end of school for planting time and the children had to help. Some schools today are talking about running all year long, oh, that was intermission, now back to my original story.

Harvest time is the time that we celebrate Halloween, All Hallows Eve, when witches and goblins come out and, speaking of which, this is the gist of my story. My Father had worked a long day at the refinery and came home tired and frustrated. He had gone out to get my brother and me Halloween costumes, late as usual, so there would be very few pickin’s in the store at that time. He bought my brother what I remember to be a cowboy costume and for me, what was it, oh my goodness, it was a witch’s costume. I'm a little boy, what was he thinking!! This had to be a joke, but it wasn't. He tried to force me to wear it. Can't you just imagine it, a little preschool boy that had been teased about his curly hair and called a little girl all his life (till he got big enough to frighten the other boys), in his fruit of the looms having a tantrum yelling that he would not go out dressed like a little girl in a skirt, even if it was a witches skirt. (I've always had a fascination for witches ever since, even my wife has two different colored eyes). I broke away, ran to my room, flopped down on my bed and cried myself to sleep. This was the worst Halloween ever. The next morning when I got up, outside my bedroom door I found a bag of trick or treat candy.

 

I never found out if it was my father or my brother that did that for me (or maybe my mother), but I like to think it was my big brother. Even if we never got along that much, I have always looked up to him and been proud of him and loved him. We were over 5 years apart and the times had changed so dramatically by the time I grew up. A little brother will always need his big brother. Now that I am an adult, I look back and feel like I understand my father a little bit more. He was a good man and I loved him too. We never seemed to see eye to eye either, but I know that he loved me and, just maybe, he didn’t know how to show it. 

Funniest Friend We Ever Had Robin Williams RIP

There have only been three celebrities that have passed away that affected me so deeply.  The first was Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll, the second was Annette Funicello, America’s sweetheart, and the third was Robin Williams, the king of comedy, who died today.

  Mr. Williams seemed to be able to light up in any room that he walked into. He had a personality that exploded with a vibrancy that had not been seen but one other time before in a comedian that I know of and that was Jonathan Winters.  If you looked up comedian for our generation in the dictionary there would be a picture of Robin Williams with no explanation needed. How could you explain a mind that was so brilliant at comedy and so far above anyone else in his field. To have called Robin Williams a genius at his craft would not be an understatement but it still could not describe how great his talent really was.  I have seen comedy club skits where someone would throw an object onto the stage or Mr. Williams would get an object from a member of the audience and do 15 minutes of the most hilarious improvisational comedy that anyone could imagine.

  It saddens me so that Robin Williams has been taken from us at such an early age when we still needed the laughter and the happiness that he gave us so very desperately today.  I tried to think of whom to compare Robin Williams with but everyone I came up with, including Jonathan Winters, just didn’t seem to fit Robin Williams.  Mr. Williams was around when the comedy clubs were at their peak. Things like Second City and Saturday Night Live were getting the highest ratings possible for shows in their time slots.  Mr. Williams was packing in the comedy clubs at that time and he continued to the pack them in professionally at any venue he appeared at.  Mr. Williams reinvented itself and had a brilliant comedic movie career while still appearing at comedy clubs when he could.  He also appeared on television shows such as Mork and Mindy and his latest television show, the Crazy Ones.  He also proved himself and as a dramatic actor and Julliard proud. I can’t help but think that Mr. Williams needed us, his audience, almost as much as we needed him.  So much has been written about Robin Williams and I’m sure so much more will be written and, in doing so, I hope the world will be kind to this comedic giant whose only goal in life was to make us all smile and give us a laugh or two.

So please join me in a prayer or two for our lovely friend Mr. Robin Williams, because he did make you feel as if he was your best friend or a member of your family. What greater thing can one say of another human being than “he made me happy”.  Robin, my friend, we’ll miss you.

I have to tell you I never had considered the fact that anyone else had never tried a tomato sandwich. We called them mater sandwiches when I was a kid.  The tomatoes taste slightly different at various times of the year. Hothouse tomatoes and various types of tomatoes also taste different but I have to say the tomatoes that we got locally in Memphis were the best tasting tomatoes for the tomato sandwich of any place I’ve ever lived, so I didn’t eat them all that much after I had moved away, till one day I tried a slice of tomato from the ugliest tomatoes I had ever seen and they work perfect. I asked my wife if she wanted one and she said she’d never tried one. I was shocked that after 32 years I had never introduced her to a tomato sandwich. I had introduced her to fried green tomatoes and fried okra but I had let her down by not introducing her to the most delicious southern delicacy known to man. 

Of course, a lot of people may differ in their technique in preparing a tomato sandwich but here’s how I do it.  It has to be the regular white bread that we got as kids and real mayonnaise spread on the bread thickly, two generous slices of tomato a quarter inch thick are better and salted generously and then enjoyed to your heart’s content.  I never knew how lucky I was living in Memphis and enjoying the cuisine that Memphis had to offer.  I have always attributed the variety of delicious foods to the fact that Memphis is dead center of the south and was a major artery for the native Americans along the Mississippi River that early British, Irish and Spanish settlers and French Canadians used when fleeing from the tyranny of the British in Canada to Louisiana.  Because of the cotton plantations all around Memphis there were abundant slaves that brought their cuisine from Africa as well. I even think that my wife’s German family recipes influenced my cooking talents. So to summarize, we had the best of the Native American influence, the French Canadian influence, the Spanish influence and the African influence, and the best of these influences on our food in Memphis.  I don’t want to leave out the British and the Irish influence on the food that we know as Memphis cuisine.  I thoroughly believe that our mothers were influenced in some way by all of the blending of the cultural foods that passed through Memphis on its way south or west.  I have no proof of this other than to give you certain examples like a southern buttermilk biscuit. Where do you think the Southerners got the recipe for the southern biscuit?  I will give you my assumption by asking you to look at the recipes of the Scottish scone.  They mirror the southern biscuits in many ways. With a couple of exceptions they are identical.  Those exceptions are things that would have been difficult for the early Southern settlers to find, so the mothers and wives of the early settlers would have had to adapt and change the recipe to what they had on hand.  The same could be said of all of the ethnic cultures that passed through Memphis and there is some similarity to all of the foods that we serve on our tables today to all of the cultures and cuisines that were a great part in making up what I call Memphis fixin’s. 

My family came from farmers, wheel rites and trades people, but I think the earliest of my family were farmers and had pigs that they would raise to sell the better parts of meat to the butchers but they would keep things like the legs and feet, the head and the ribs that the butchers could not sell to those that could afford to buy their meat at a store.  Now you find such things like ribs and pig knuckles, ham hocks and other such meats that the farmers would make meals for their families with.  One of the biggest restaurants in Memphis that’s known worldwide serves the best dry rub ribs in the world.  If it had not been for the fact that the farmers could not sell these parts of the pig to the butchers, we might not have had the barbecued ribs that most of us love today.  So much of our culture has been blended and processed into what we know now.  I know all of you have had smoked or sugar cured ham and a biscuit for breakfast or you had biscuits and gravy. 

It’s kind of funny when you travel the United States and look at what the restaurants serve for breakfast and I’m gonna pick biscuits and gravy to make my example. I have seen in the western states that they use brown gravy made with either cornstarch or some other type of thickener for biscuits and gravy.  In the deep south, it’s what we call sawmill gravy which is grease flour and water, spiced with pork sausage mixed in to make the gravy.  As you travel up into the north east, it is just flour, salt, pepper and grease that makes up the gravy.  To give you a taste of East Tennessee cuisine, one of the main dishes that seems to have been a staple in the mountains of Tennessee is white beans and onions served together with cornbread and they don’t seem to use any other spices for their beans and onions.  I have to say that the restaurants and your tables in your homes serve way better food than you get here and like I’ve said to many people, you can’t get better food than you get in Memphis.  I even remember a place in Memphis on Park Avenue, I think, where they had a restaurant called the Barbecue Palace where you could get anything and everything barbecued and I don’t mean grilled on a grill, which brings up another interesting tidbit, in Canada if you put it on a grill that makes it barbecue and I’m not sure whether their wrong or I’m wrong but, to me, you can grill anything without it being barbecue. It’s the preparation and the sauce that makes it barbecue.  At the Barbecue Palace you could get their sample platter which had barbecued bologna, barbecued ham, barbecued beef brisket, barbecued pork shoulder pulled or chopped, and it even had barbecued spam which, from what I understand, is a Hawaiian delicacy. 

I really loved remembering the end of this school year picnics that we had at Charjean. All of our mothers would get together and make their most famous dishes trying to outdo one another and we, their children, would get the most marvelous meals ever created.  I remember the sweets, the meats, the vegetables, prepared in their family recipes for all of us to enjoy.  Our mothers did way much, much more than I have ever seen since those days for the parties that we had at school than they do today.  I can just smell the sugar cured ham that they prepared the way that their families had done for years. The aroma would just burst your taste buds wide open. 

They even went all out when we just made hamburgers and hot dogs with special mustards that they personally made, the ingredients that they put into the hamburgers and, one time, one mother even made the buns homemade herself. Who does that today?  I do still bake my own bread at times and there is nothing like homemade bread.  When we sat down to a meal at my house there was always either homemade biscuits or homemade corn bread and even sometimes there would be homemade yeast rolls.  My mother was not necessarily a baker when it comes to making homemade bread but my grandmother was and, Oh, what bread she made.  There are two smells in this world that will bring me to tears almost immediately because I remember my mother and my grandmother through those smells. One of them was homemade bread baking and the other was homemade fresh apple pie baking.  We lived right behind the apple orchard that later became Airways Junior High School and we could pick as many apples as we could take home and they were the green apples that I personally think make the absolute best pies because the blending of that tart sweet and cinnamon flavors along with the homemade pie crust were the most heavenly taste, well almost.

I personally think that the old cranked homemade ice creams that all of us were used to were absolutely the defining moment in sweet treats. 

I know all of you have your favorites and I’m sure they were passed down from one family to another or your spouse brought them into your family and it could even be possible that you picked them up from your neighbors or friends.  Food has defined the south as long as I can remember and I think that southern cooks have always been willing to experiment and adapt to their surroundings with new and exotic flavors.  If you are like me, I still long for the foods that my mother and grandmother made and that the ladies of our neighborhoods prepared for us when we were kids.