crossed over the street and I saw the big brown sign that read Horn & Hardart. A line stretched out to the front door. Under the Horn & Hardart sign that hung over Market Street; there was a small white plaque that read “Automat.”
“What’s an automat?” I asked.
“You’ll see when we get inside,” my mom answered.
“I don’t know what you do at an automat, I’m gonna embarrass myself,” I said.
“Don’t be silly, just watch the other people and you’ll see what to do,” my mom said in a reassuring tone. “Follow me and I’ll help you.”
Reaching the back of the line and I carefully studied the other customers to see what they did when it was their turn. There was a menu hanging on the back wall with the prices. Luckily, the line was moving slowly, and I had plenty of time to scrutinize the menu board. Everything sounded delicious; I must have been very hungry. They had a Saturday Special, hamburger steak with mashed potatoes and green peas for twenty cents. It sounded like heaven, except for the twenty cents, I didn’t know if mom had twenty cents. Moreover, if she did, I didn’t know if she had enough money to buy herself lunch. This was terrible; I couldn’t make my mom spend all her money just to buy me lunch.
“Well what would you like?” she asked.
I would have liked anything, but all I could think about was how much money it would cost.
“I’m not really hungry, I was just kidding,” I said.
Mom looked me right in the eyes and said, “I have extra money, don’t worry you can get whatever you like. How about the hamburger special?”
“Are you sure you have enough money? That seems kind of expensive just for lunch.”
“I cleaned two extra houses this week so I can be a big spender and give us to a special treat,” she replied with a smile.
Well if she had the money, I was not going to argue. As we got to the front of the line, I discovered what an automat was. All the food was lined up on the wall behind small glass doors. Customers walked up to the food they wanted and inserted a coin in the slot next to the door. Then they turned the knob and opened the window. Each item had a different price and the door would only open when you put in the right amount of coins. I was getting dizzy from all the choices.
Mom reached in her pocketbook and gathered a handful of coins. She handed me a bunch of nickels and dimes and told me that I could get whatever I wanted. The sense of anticipation left me light headed. I took out a dime, put it in the hamburger steak slot, and twisted the knob. I could hear the coin drop as I lifted the window. Out came a plate with the hamburger steak. I moved down the line, saw the mashed potatoes, and put my nickel in that slot. A slight turn and they were on my plate as well. Then came one of the greatest sights I had ever seen. At the far end of the vegetables was the dessert selection. I had never seen so many choices in my entire life.
They had cherry pie, apple pie, and peach pie. Then came the pudding choices; vanilla, chocolate, rice pudding. This was unbelievable. Then it hit me again, my mom was splurging to buy me a great lunch, but another nickel for dessert was being overly extravagant. I moved my eyes away from the dessert windows and started to walk towards a table. Just then, I felt my mom tap me on the shoulder as she motioned in the direction of the desserts.
“I don’t want any dessert,” I said. “After I eat all this I won’t have any room left for dessert.”
“You can’t fool me, no sensible boy would turn down a delicious dessert selection like that,” she said.
She then came back to where I stood and took my hand. Turning me around, she walked me back directly in front of the massive dessert automat machine.
“Here’s a nickel and you can pick out anything you want for dessert,” she said.
“I told you, I don’t need dessert after eating such a big lunch.”
It was very hard to fool her. She put the nickel in my hand as she walked back to get her lunch plate.
“It’s not every day that you get so many choices of what to eat for dessert, go enjoy yourself,” she said.
This was one of those monumental decisions. Should I go with cherry pie, which I knew I loved, or try peach pie for a change, what about pudding, I always loved chocolate pudding. Then it hit me, this was going to be a very special day and I was going to be bold. I was standing directly in front of two rows of automat doors marked tapioca pudding. I did not know what tapioca pudding was, but there were so many people buying it that I figured it had to be good. These people must have been here before and if tapioca pudding was what you ate when you go to Horn & Hardarts then I would have tapioca pudding.
All I could think about as I ate my lunch was the tapioca pudding. I starred at it as I chewed my hamburger steak. I even tried to sneak a little bit of pudding onto the fork mixed in with my mashed potatoes, but mom caught me and with a stern look had me return the pudding to the bowl until I was done my lunch. The tapioca was worth the wait, it was as delicious as anything I had ever remembered eating before. I could almost hear myself humming out of pure joy as I finished the bowl. I waited until mom got up from the table to clear her plate and I ran my finger along the inside of the bowl to get the last bit of pudding and then quickly licked it off before she returned. I promptly cleared my plates so she would not notice how perfectly clean my bowl was, and try to figure out how I was able to get every bit of pudding.
I did not care what else we were going to do, after that meal; I figured I owed my mom a hard day’s work. We walked up Market Street passing the big department stores. There was Gimbels and Lit Brothers, each with their decorated windows displaying all the new fancy clothes. We walked over to Chestnut Street and passed by the A.G. Spalding sporting goods store.
“Look at all the fancy stuff in Spalding’s window,” my mom commented as I stopped to have a look.
“Boy. They got everything we would ever need,” I said. “But everything costs so much money. Some of the baseball mitts cost nine dollars. The bats are two dollars each, and even the baseballs are one dollar and seventy five cents.”
“That is quite a bit of money, but someday we’ll be able to afford a nice baseball mitt for you,” my mom started, “just not today.”
We finally got to the meat store. It was called Lewis Quality Meats and was at the corner of 2nd and Poplar Streets. They had chuck roast for ten cents a pound, lean soup meat for six cents a pound and stewing chickens for thirty-four cents a pound. Mom spoke to the man behind the counter as I wandered around the store. He was the butcher, a quite portly gentleman, in his white apron.
“Can you go get me a loaf of bread,” she asked. “You know what kind, don’t you?”
“Sure do,” I replied.
I walked over to the shelf that had many different brands of breads on it and grabbed a loaf of Victor bread. I did not even have to ask, mom always brought Victor bread and it was only five cents for a loaf.
Mom spent the next ten minutes picking out the other items from the shelves and putting them into her metal basket. She always took her folding metal shopping cart with her when she shopped. It had wheels on the bottom, would fold flat, and would close when it was empty. When unfolded, it had plenty of room to put all the food you bought at the store and you could roll it back to the trolley for the ride home. It certainly made the trip to the store much easier than trying to carry everything you bought home.
It wasn’t until dinnertime that we arrived home. I was still stuffed from lunch, and had a hard time forcing myself to eat dinner that night.
“What wrong? You only ate half your dinner,” mom said. “I guess my cooking isn’t as good as the food at Horn & Hardarts.”
I had to think about my answer for a second, not wanting to hurt her feelings. Then she smiled at me and shook her head, letting me know that it was really a question I did not have to answer.
15
Reverend Casey’s Sunday sermon included a plea for the parishioners to give a little extra each week in a special donation that would go towards buildin
g the baseball field. It sounded as though the fundraising was not going very well.
“We all need to dig a little deeper into our pockets if we are ever going to get this field built,” he said. “Some of you have suggested running a bake sale, where we would donate special treats that you baked and we could sell them to raise money. Others have said it might be a good idea to have a rummage sale where everyone would clean out their houses, and sell all their unwanted items and give all the proceeds to the fund. Well I am here to say I am willing to try anything, so we will try both of these and see what we can do.”
They quickly organized the bake sale and held it the following Saturday. It turned out to be a rainy day and not many people showed up. Much of the baked goods went unsold, and in the end, everyone traded the food that they brought to their neighbors so they could take something different home. We had brought three apple pies that my mom had baked. She had sold one and we traded the other two for a chocolate cake that Mrs. Garrity had made. I am certain that they would have raised more money if the parishioners just had given the church the money that they had spent on the ingredients for the baking.
The rummage sale was scheduled for the next weekend.
“Go down the cellar and bring up those boxes of rummage from your parents old house,” my mom yelled upstairs to my dad.
“Hey, I don’t want to get rid of