Lunch Half Hour

Lunch time in "Grade School" meant two choices. You could take your lunch and be marooned at the lunch area segregated for those who had sack lunch or eat cafeteria food and set with regular people. During my hitch in the lower grades, lunch cost 25 cents a day or a dollar for a weekly ticket. The wealthier kids got a monthly ticket!

I may have been one of the only kids who actually liked cafeteria food. Their bowls of stew or brown beans was as good as any ones. Of course I wasn't crazy about Lima beans and celery filled with a weird cheese spread, but no body's perfect. Besides in elementary it was eat fast and head to the playground. These were the days though where you could get seconds on anything left and that sometimes meant an extra piece of cake for desert. Milk was 3 cents and a little ice cream carton was 5 cents.

In junior high things changed. Once in the High school building the classes lined up according to which home room classes behaved the best the preceding week. In junior high and High School we had a new choice we could leave campus to eat. You could even go home for lunch if you were quick enough. Most went downtown (three blocks away). Many kids went to Bynums, Allens, or Nessers Grocery stores and bought pop, candy and chips. Others headed to the Right Way Cafe or the Busy Bee.

Whenever I went downtown, I went with the guys headed to the Busy Bee. The problem was that eating downtown was expensive compared to the lunch room by about 15 cents. Getting enough to eat was a problem. 35 cents would by a hamburger and a coke at the Busy Bee, but hamburgers need french fries and that presented three problems. French Fries take longer to prepare and they alone cost cost 25 cents. the third problem was you were expected to SHARE!

So the solution the older guys had developed was to order a side of mashed potatoes and brown gravy with our burgers. This side cost 15 cents and was a large portion. I was never crazy about this but I went along to be one of the guys. That was the junior high diet for the town crowd. At least in the cafeteria they didn't serve a chili dog with green beans!

In High School I had a car but chose to eat most meals at the cafeteria and then jump in the car and drive to Parks Supermarket. For a quarter I could buy: Pepsi-10 cents, a bag of potato chips-5 cents, a Mister Good Bar - 5 cents and a package of pretzels to sneak into Mrs. Sim's English Class.

Planning lunch was not easy in 30 minutes!