Jerry Ochs

A trivia question for those who never forget: In which school year were metal forks temporarily replaced with plastic forks because some boys were sticking the metal forks in the caf's ceiling?

Jeff Daum

Darn Jerry,  I remember them being in the ceilings but not the year (still don't remember anything about the food.  Must be some sort of serious mental block .  I do remember eating at White Castles 5 for a quarter when I was a patrol boy at Bond Hill Elementry but no meals at WHHS). 

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

I loved Johnny Marzetti! (Ann Shepard Reuve, I'm surprised that you haven't weighed in on our food remembrances!)

Philip Spiess

Jerry:  I'm saying it was our Junior (though possibly Sophomore) year.  The event was thus:  Jeff is correct that there were metal forks stuck in the acoustic tile ceiling every one of the six years we were there, but in this particular year the forks went up to such an extent that there were almost no metal forks left in the cafeteria to wash and reuse.  The cafeteria staff therefore replaced all metal forks with plastic forks (I even have a vague memory that they tried charging us a penny or two for them), but this move turned out to be disastrous:  the plastic forks broke off in some of the harder food and occasionally actually melted in some of the very hot food (god knows what kind of plastics they were using in those days!).  As a result, we -- yes, we -- students revolted (it was, in all probability, the first student revolt of the 1960s, waaay before Berkeley):  we went on a strike (planned the day before, sort of like a spontaneous "flash mob" event) and uniformly boycotted the WHHS cafeteria lunch line the next day; even students who never brought their lunch but always ate the cafeteria food brought a lunch that day!  The result was that all of the cafeteria food prepared that day went to waste (presumably at some cost).  And the Grand End Result of the Student Strike?  Cincinnati's Superintendent of Schools Dr. Pierce (yes, the dad of our own class's Kristin Pierce) went on the 11:00 p.m. news to beg the students of Walnut Hills High School to return to their lunchroom.  Which we did [for this phrase, see the popular "Seckatary Hawkins" mysteries, written and published by Robert Schulkers in Cincinnati in the 1920s and 1930s], and our metal forks were returned to us.  A true harbinger of things to come!

Gail:  I, too, loved Johnny Marzetti, which, I believe, originated (at least under that name) in Marzetti's Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio (it also marketed commercially several Marzetti salad dressings).

Jeff:  White Castle hamburgers ("Buy 'Em by the Sack!") were my family's late-night snack of choice (with coffee).  My father used to call the restaurants "Whitey Casselli's Aluminum Room."  And you won't be surprised to learn (you and I have been through this before) that my capacious library has a published history (1997) of the White Castle hamburger chain ("and its role in American history").

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

I could have sworn we had this conversation earlier in the Forum, but checking, I couldn't find anything about the cafeteria food. I was a picky eater in those days.  I didn't like the Johnny Marzetti or pinwheels but I loved spaghetti meat.  My favorite was always Friday's, the macaroni and (surplus) cheese with the square fish. 

The lunch lady, Narcissus White was the "Soup Nazi" long before Jerry Seinfeld coined the name.  You had to say,"May I please have the ________ ", then smile. She could not stand those boys, especially David M. Schneider!!  

I don't remember any vending machines at school, but rumor had it there was a Coke machine in the teachers' lounge. But, after school, the Blair Ave. Market at the corner of Blair and Woodburn had all the candy you'd ever want: dots, lick-em-ade, candy cigarettes, bull's eyes, bazooka bubble gum, etc

As for White Castles, my grade school, Evanston Elementary, did not have a cafeteria to prepare lunches, simply a lunch room.  It was either bring lunch,always a grape preserves on white bread sandwich, and a banana or chili in a Thermos.  On days I didn't bring lunch, we could go across the street on Montgomery Rd. to buy White Castles.  Being an even pickier eater in fourth, fifth and sixth grades, there could not be one tiny sliver of onion or pickle on the slider.  Thinking back though, there were two restaurants across the street on Dana Avenue, but black kids couldn't go to them until I was in sixth grade.  

Dale Gieringer

    I remember that Ms. Renfro complained about the forks in Latin class, which would have been our sophomore year.   Shortly afterwards, she recanted after dining in the student lunchroom and being served a half-cooked grilled cheese sandwich.   "Now I understand why you're all upset at the lunches here," she said.  It was an unusual change of mind for her, a lady of decided opinions who habitually spent the first half of class editorializing on current events before dispatching us on a forced march through 35 lines of Cicero.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

I do remember the forks in the ceiling!  How funny - haven't thought of that in years.  I didn't usually buy food in the cafeteria, I brought my lunch most of the time, but I do remember Johnny Marzetti.  I doubt I ever ate it.  I read a description and the origin in Columbus Ohio on Wikipedia.  It sounds sort of like Hamburger Helper but it seems like a decent school lunch.  Was there also a Turkey Tetrazini?  If yes, then I think I bought that for lunch.    Probably the only thing I bought in a cafeteria in Elementary School was a hotdog.  Did they have them at Walnut Hills?  If they did then I probably bought on that day too.  

I still love White Castles.  There isn't one in my town but sometimes we will stop when near one.  The frozen boxed ones in the grocery store are not the same but will do if desperate.  You will have to add your own pickles to them, they're not in the box.  

Dale Gieringer

I couldn't stomach the John Marzetti myself and poked fun at it in a Chatterbox column.  What I did enjoy were the hot dogs  - that was my favorite lunch.  I always took at least two, with baked beans.   Another favorite for me was the roast beef.  I recall paying 52 cents for roast beef and mashed potatoes with cherry pie and milk. That was out of my $3.50/week allowance, which got raised to $4 sometime in our later years.  The hamburgers weren't so delectable; they lacked the accoutrements of Frisch's.  As for Narcissus, she earned honorable mention in "Pomp and Circumstance: "Six years in the lunch room/ peas, carrots and hash/ why hasn['t Narcissus died from serving that trash?"   I remember eating lunch with Denis Montgomery one day when they were serving  ham loaf - a sort of turd-shaped meat loaf made out of minced pork.  Mashed potatoes with beef gravy was also on the menu that day.  Denis ordered the ham loaf and the potatoes.  "Do you want gravy on that?" asked the serving lady.  Denis said yes, and she poured the gravy on the ham loaf instead of the potatoes.  "The reason I asked is that most people don't like it that way," she said.  Denis stepped outside and hurled the gravy-sodden ham loaf at a second-story class window, where it stuck like a Harpy's droppings.    I didn't discover White Castle until junior or senior year;  at 8 cents apiece, they were a steal -  a half dozen for the price of a Big Boy. White Castle published a magazine, a house organ featuring interviews with employees,  which we used to read with mirth.  I wonder whether it's still in publication, or have they gone to Facebook?

Jerry Ochs

As I recall, Fridays were always meatless.  I assume God took note. 

Input your ZIP code on the White Castle web site to find the shop nearest you.  There is now one in Lost Wages, Nevada.  There is also a roving burger truck.  In the early 1980s an outlet opened briefly in Osaka.  I bought them by the sack and often schlepped 40 or 50 back to Kobe.

From lunchroom revolt, it was but a small step to exorcising the Pentagon.

Philip Spiess

Speaking of Turkey Tetrazzini [see Barbara's Post #1733], I'm sure you all know the phrase, "The opera isn't over till the fat lady sings!"  The tradition of the "fat lady" in opera -- and particularly as it worked its way into the American consciousness through comic strips and cartoons -- began with three opera singers all performing at about the same period, at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century (Nelson, add anything you want here).  These large ladies were:  Luisa Tetrazzini (Italian coloratura soprano, 1871-1940); Dame Nellie Melba [originally Helen Porter Mitchell, who took her stage name from the city of her birth, Melbourne] (Australian soprano, 1861-1931); and Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink (Austrian, later American, contralto, 1861-1936).  Chicken Tetrazzini (sometimes made with turkey or veal) was created and named after Luisa Tetrazzini, due to her popularity in America (no one knows when or where, though some say it was in San Francisco), and it later became her favorite dish, despite the fact that she wrote in her autobiography, "I eat the plainest food always. . . ."  [N.B.:  Chicken Tetrazzini is definitely not plain, but pretty rich.]  Nellie Melba had two foods created in her honor, one, Melba Sauce (the sauce which enriches the dish Peach Melba), created for her by the famous chef Escoffier at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in London, and the other, Melba Toast, also created for her (as a food which would help her lose weight) by Escoffier when he was head chef at the Savoy Hotel in London.  Madame Schumann-Heink, to my knowledge, had no foods named for her (no, Heink's 57 Varieties is not an option here), but she is famed in the United States for having popularized the German Christmas carol, "Silent Night," in concerts and recordings by singing it in English.  There were later other large female opera stars (it's the lungs, you know), but these are the "Big Three."

[N.B:  There appears to be much recent discussion above about hot dogs.  The term "hot dog" now seems to have wiped out the older term "Wiener," which referred to Vienna sausages, "Wien" being the German for "Vienna."  (Just so, a "Hamburger" originally referred to Steak Tartare from Hamburg, which is raw ground beef; cooked, the Hamburger was popularized at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, where the ice cream cone also originated, although it was actually White Castle hamburgers, originated in 1921 in Wichita and which reached Cincinnati in 1927, that elevated the hamburger above the working class and made the hamburger a national food; a Frankfurter, obviously, is a sausage from Frankfurt, Germany.)  But to finish with the hot dog, the term "wiener" now apparently among the young and very young refers exclusively to the male organ of generation.  So I'll just nostalgically repeat a cute mantra of the late 1960s:  "Happiness is a warm puppy; misery is a cold hot dog."

Bruce Fette

I wish we had White Castles here in DC! The frozen ones from the supermarket are just not as good as the fresh from the griddle ones!

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Phil,  I enjoyed all the food trivia immensely!  Today we had White Castles for lunch....once the idea was planted in my head I had to have them!

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

I think I'll have several White Castles after Boot Camp ( cross fit) on Sunday. 

Philip Spiess

More White Castle trivia for you all:  During World War II, the White Castle hamburger chain suffered mightily (as did many other eating establishments) from wartime food shortages and rationing (much of the food going to "our boys overseas").  One such "luxury" item was cream, which White Castle customers used liberally in their coffee (a major staple of White Castle restaurants, along with the hamburgers).  Initially the company tried to limit its customers' use of cream, but the problem was solved when the Cincinnati distribution plant (each city had a White Castle distribution plant which bought the meat, made the hamburger patties, baked the hamburger buns, cut up the onions, packed the pickles, etc., for all of the White Castle stands in its distribution area) devised a formula for mixing two quarts of cream with one quart of whole milk, thereby stretching the cream supply by a third.  Other areas followed suit, and this mixture eventually acquired the generic name of "half & half," still the standard creamer for most Americans today.  Later on in the war (1943-1944), even hamburger meat was not often available to civilians, and thus not to hamburger chains, either.  What to do to keep in business?  The White Castle chain tried a number of things; in Cincinnati, it first experimented with serving spaghetti (selling it for 10 cents), an idea which soon spread to other White Castle service areas.  Later, during the Korean War, at the beginning of the 1950s, the availability of hamburger meat again became a problem (suppliers were profitting from making the meat scarce).  In 1951, White Castle's headquarters (in Columbus) decided it had to reduce its hamburger patty from one ounce to eight-tenths of an ounce.  The solution, it turned out, had been suggested in 1947 by Cincinnati White Castle operator Earl Howell, who had come up with the idea of boring (the now well-known) five distinctive holes in each hamburger patty.  This (and making the patty thinner) achieved the necessary 10% meat reduction -- though the chain touted this change as making the meat cook faster, while allowing more steam and juices to escape into the bun toasting on top (this is true enough, but not the real reason for the famous holes!). 

And was White Castle's selling of spaghetti a harbinger of things to come in Cincinnati?  After all, Skyline Chili (the best!), which includes spaghetti as one option of its "6-way chili," was founded just after the war in 1947 (if I recollect correctly).  As you may know, Skyline Chili was founded by Greeks, and its "secret" ingredient is cinnamon (many cookbooks and other know-alls will tell you that "Cincinnati chili" includes chocolate, but that's not so -- that's a Mexican dish).  Anyway, chili has an honorable history in Cincinnati, as it goes way back before Prohibition to the days of the Vine Street saloons ("21 beers for a dollar!") and their free lunches (hotly spiced and/or heavily salted foods at the "free lunch counters" would make you order more beer to quench your thirst).  Chili was also sold on the street corners by street vendors, along with good German "wienie-wursts" [see my previous posting relating to hot dogs].  Indeed, my great aunt Emma taught me an old Cincinnati song:  "I vunce knew a man who could shtand on his head, / And he used to sell vienie-vurst, mustard, und bread. / Nice little vienie-vurst, two for a dime, / in Old Zinzinnati, right Over-the-Rhine! // Dis man dat I knew had a box made of tin, / Dat he used to keep mustard und horseradish in, / Mit a flame at da bottom to make da vurst cook, / Und five cents a vienie-vurst pulled out mit a hook!"  "Und," as the Germans say, "so weiter."

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Odd that you would mention the White Castle/ spaghetti association.  In 2012, when the White Castle was eliminating locations in the Cincinnati area, one of the most popular locations, Sharonville, at the corner of Hauck Rd. and Reading Rd (Route 42), was closed, demolished, and a new gleaming building erected in its place.  The new signage introduced and association with Laughing Noodle.  You placed your order with someone behind glass and there were two different menus to choose from.   The way the restaurant was arranged, you couldn't watch the food being prepared.  The ambience wasn't like any White Castle I had ever been in, very unfriendly. Folks used to just go to the old restaurant for a cup of coffee and chat with the employees. This place reminded me of a bank.  I haven't been in the place lately, but I pass it frequently.  I've noticed, the Laughing Noodle sign is gone. The current White Castle slogan, "What You Crave", certainly didn't bring to mind a bowl of noodles. I don't think the concept of dual branding went over too well.

http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2012/09/12/white-castle-bringing-laughing-noodle.html

Jeff Daum

Hope all are enjoying a happy July 4th!

Jonathan Marks

My theory about White Castle was that buying meat wasn't an issue, since they had only one cow, which explained why there was so little meat.

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Chief wishes everyone a Happy Fourth!

Steven Levinson

Except, Jon, for when White Castle got caught using the one horse.  Which was dumb, because you can apparently cook horse meat forever, and it remains bright red.

Philip Spiess

Wow, talk about timing!  I was continuing to read the book I have on the history of White Castle hamburgers (as may be evident from my comments, although I have owned the book for a good number of years, I just started reading it after this discussion of White Castle hamburgers began), and I had just read about the "horsemeat scare" in the hamburger industry in Chicago, Indiana, and Minnesota in the early 1950s, when Steve's comments popped up.  Although White Castle maintained (and advertised) "100% beef," jocular customers would say, "Saddle me two to go!"

Philip Spiess

Okay, folks, I have a certain sense that I post way too much commentary on this Forum -- I really do not wish to bore you or monopolize the site.  But I want to comment tonight, having watched tonight on TV, both last year's and this year's "Fourth of July Concert on the National Mall in Washington" presentations (PBS), on their presentation of patriotic music.  I will not dwell on the fact that for some years these concerts have become all too synonymous with all of the other concerts and shows -- Presidential Inaugural Ball specials and Presidential "Chrismas Concerts" at the National Building Museum (and even "special concerts" in the East Room of the White House), Memorial Day and Veterans' Day concerts on the Mall, special national awards shows at the Kennedy Center, and even the Oscar awards, the Tony awards, etc., etc. -- they are all too similar,  grandiose, and stylized in the one Hollywood fashion.

No, right now I wish to focus on a passion of mine, the march music of John Phillip Sousa (who is buried in the Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill in Washington).  I have enjoyed his music since the age of one or two, when I am told that I stood on a park bench in Burnet Woods in Clifton during the Thursday night summer band concerts  (Herbert Tiemeyer was usually conducting) and directed his marches with my index finger.  (Both Tiemeyer and another Burnet Woods conductor, "Smittie," director of Withrow High School's band, and a descendent of several generations of Smith, or Schmidt, German band directors in Cincinnati, always ended their concerts with Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," immortalized by the radio singer Kate Smith, which we all sang as we returned to our cars).  Sousa, as I am sure we all acknowledge, was indeed the "March King," but I am driven crazy by the fact that nowadays, on almost all national holidays, all we hear of his many excellent works is his greatest march, "Stars and Stripes Forever" (which apparently came to him in a dream).  I have nothing but admiration for this march, but I heard it at least five times tonight, and I am gagging in my Scotch -- Sousa wrote so many other good marches!  I was a member of both the Walnut Hills Fighting Eagles Marching Band and the Walnut Hills Golden Eagles Concert Band for six years, and under Edgar Loar we played many of Sousa's marches (our book was March Masters, which also included classical European marches, German, Austrian, and French, which are quite different in style from American marches).  At least the Army Band (or whoever it was) also played Sousa's second most famous march, "The Washington Post March" (named after the newspaper, not a military post, and which is really a "two-step" dance, not strictly a march), as well as his "The Thunderer," another of his really great marches.  But there are so many others we rarely hear any more:  "El Capitan" (for years the radio theme of the Cincinnati Redlegs baseball reporting with Waite Hoyt), "Semper Fidelis," "High School Cadets," "The Liberty Bell March," "Manhattan Beach," and so many others.  Where are they now in performance?

But now we pass on to a sequel:  The second greatest march master in America, after Sousa, was Henry Fillmore of Cincinnati, composing in the 1910s and 1920s.  He wrote such works as "The Cincinnati Post March," (after the newspaper, perhaps as a response to Sousa's "Washington Post March").  But some of his finest works were for trombone slides:  a whole "family" of trombone tunes, including "De Lassus Trombone" (the best, to my mind, in this genre), "Miss Sally Trombone," etc., and many other marches, which do not come readily to memory (if you want me to, I will reseach it; I have the resources).  In the early 1960s, the University of Cincinnati Marching Band made a recording of many of his marches (including the trombone slides), but I don't think they've been recorded since (the Rochester School of Music recorded many of Sousa's marches in the mid 1960s in a three-volume set). 

Nancy Messer

Phil - Don't you dare stop your commentary.  Most of the time I know nothing about the subject and find it interesting to read.  It alway amazes me how much you know about so many topics.  Keep your stories (bad choice of words) coming.

Stephen (Steve) Dixon

I'm with you, Phil, on your love for march music and Sousa in particular. Back in the late 60's, I was given a boxed set of LP's that was all famous marches by great bands and orchestras. That's where I first learned to appreciate some of the great marches from opera, like the ones from Aida & Gounod's Faust.

Two whole LP's were Sousa marches and I played them a lot, all the ones you mentioned and many more. It is hard choose but, if I had to single one out it would probably be The Thunderer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nJPUD57L7c

Oh, and you can dispense with the notion that you overpost. It's all good stuff.

Stephen (Steve) Dixon

I'm reading a review, today, in the New York Times of a new book about the fight over school integration in Prince Edward County, VA. I think I may buy this book:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/books/review/something-must-be-done-about-prince-edward-county-by-kristen-green.html?ref=books

It has me wondering, when did Walnut Hills first become a racially integrated school? We all came in the fall of 1957 and it seemed like pretty much of a long-established tradition to me. I don't remember there being any public conversation about the issue. Or any kind of whoop-de-doo. My folks, both born and raised in Nashville and having lived in the South (I capitalize intentionally) until we moved to Cincy in 1954, never said a word about it.

Out in Mt. Washington, where I lived, we talked more about the sexes being separated at the Catholic school, McNicholas High. I was never inside that building, but the word was that the lunchroom was separated by a wall with plate glass windows. I used to joke about guys with their faces pressed up against the window, gazing at the phenomenon of a girl actually eating lunch. (I was a real riot back in those days.)

Philip Spiess

Steve:  So far as I know, there were African-American students at Walnut Hills High School when my mother went there, 1933-1939 (but I'll ask her).  I should have an inkling of the answer to your query, given my work in times past at the Cincinnati Historical Society, but I just don't remember (and my Cincinnati archives are buried in the stacks, where I can't get to them easily).  I can tell you that during the era of George B. Cox, Cincinnati's "political boss," who ran the Republican machine circa 1890s to 1910s, before City Manager-government, African-Americans always voted with the Republicans, who did them certain favors.  The Rev. Wendell Phillips Dabney was a prominent black preacher in the city at this time; he also published the most important African-American newspaper in Cincinnati.  I could not, for the life of me, figure out the connection between the Republican machine and the black community (it certainly didn't hark back to Abolitionist days) -- until one day we came across a very rare photograph in the Cincinnati Historical Society:  it was "Boss" Cox with all of his henchmen, identified as to name and position in the Cox "machine"!  Front and center in the photo, below Cox himself, was the Rev. Dabney, noted as "Paymaster" of the city of Cincinnati.  In other words, he was the one who distributed the "Cox machine's" graft money (if it was indeed graft money, or just "encouraging" bribes) around the city! . . .  I also know that for many years, through school district boundaries that separated neighborhoods, parents (not the school board) kept black students out of Clifton Elementary School, but there were black students there by the time I started Kindergarten in 1951. . . .  And I recall that for many years, Coney Island Amusement Park was strictly white, on the interesting if dubious claim that, because the owners, Edward L. Schott and his son-in-law, Ralph Wachs, maintained an apartment in the Administration Building, the park was a "private home" and the owners could "invite" (and keep out) anyone they wanted.  Needless to say, they didn't "invite" any black folk. . . .   Also, the Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia, a memorial to the segregation events written about in the book you mentioned, is a very interesting small museum.

As to operatic marches, don't forget Mendelssohn's "War March of the Priests" from his opera Alathea, Bizet's "March of the Toreadors" from Carmen, and Wagner's "Procession into the Hall of Song" ("Entrance of the Troubadors") from Tannhauser.  (This last I had played at my wedding as Kathy and I marched out of the church; I wanted the music of Wagner in my wedding, but I was damned if I was going to use his misnamed "Wedding March" from Lohengrin [a.k.a. "Here Comes the Bride"], which actually occurs in the opera after the wedding and is the "March to the Bridal Chamber," namely, for the anticipated wedding-night deflowering of the virgin.)