QUESTION: What are my memories of school lunch
ANSWER: Good ones for a variety of reasons.
Our Carbon County School District in Rawlins, Wyoming, didn't have "school lunch". There were no cafeterias in any of the schools. And no lunch rooms if you wanted to bring a sack lunch. Besides it wasn't set up for the teachers to be there to supervise
that kind of thing. So, everyone had to go home to eat lunch. The lunch bell rang at 11:45 am and the afternoon bell rang at 1 pm.
I was lucky because the school was on 11th Street and I lived on 8th Street. Wasn't TOO far for a jaunt home and back with a little time for lunch. But on the bad weather days--and it was ALWAYS windy!--it might as well have been a mile or more as that's
what it seemed like to walk that few blocks.
Once home I think I pretty much dawdled before getting down to the business of actually eating. Probably read a book or the newspaper. I'm pretty sure my mother fixed my lunch every day. Not sandwiches. I didn't like peanut butter even when I was a kid. Yet I would insist she would buy a jar of Peter Pan Peanut Butter every once in a while because that was the sponser for the weekly television show "Disneyland" which I would watch after I walked down the street to Marie's mother-in-law's house because we didn't
have a TV until I was in the 6th grade. But I was always disappointed in the taste when it actually came to eating peanut butter. Frankly, I don't remember what my mom fixed for those lunches. That was in the days I ate to live. I was a scrawny little kid. About
the third smallest in my class.
That lunch break was also the opportunity to change out of a dress and wear jeans back to school on Thursday afternoon for our PE class. Thursday afternoon was the time the travelling PE teacher came to Mountain View Elementary School. Lunch break was also
convenient if I was getting sick or had the croup, I could go home and not languish for the rest of the afternoon until school was over at 3:30 pm in the Primary grades and 3:45 pm when we moved into 4th grade in the North Wing of the school. And, I think
there might have been a few times in six years that I remember FAKING that I was too sick to go back for afternoon classes. Few is the operative word because I liked school and hated missing out on what was happening. I didn't like to go back after too long
and feel like I was in the outfield of everything for a while.
Some of the kids lived down by my piano teacher. I remember their mothers would come and get them in the car. Others were not as close as I was, but they had probably about a 15 minute walk home and then 15 minutes back. There were no buses UNTIL a new housing
development waaaay west of the hospital and north of HiWay 30 was built. El Rancho. Those kids were bussed to and from school--morning, noon, and night. Not even THEY got to stay in the building for lunch time.
When I began Junior High School we walked down 7th Street by the penitentiary to Central Elementary School which housed both the elementary grades for the kids in the center section of town and the entire Rawlins Junior High. Still no busses. Some of the kids
actually ate downtown. That didn't happen for me. And now, I wonder how the kids on the far east side of town from Sunnyside Elementary and the kids south of the railroad tracks at Pershing Elementary got back and forth during lunch hour to junior high and the high school
which was near Central?
In September 1959 when I began the 8th grade, the brand new high school MILES north of the cemetery was opened. There was a cafeteria in that school! And every noon the 7th and 8th grades which had moved into the old high school got on a bus and motored
out to eat lunch in that wonderful cafeteria. I thought it was heaven. It was something I had always wanted in my school experience. To eat lunch at school.
Mrs. Morton. Broccoli. No mustard. Meatless Fridays. And, fresh homemade bread that was so very good it practically melted in your mouth. If I remember correctly, we could ask for seconds on the bread. And REAL butter like everyone ate in those days.
School lunch was where I learned I liked broccoli. I avoided it at first. I don't ever remember having it at home, and I knew I didn't like asparagus, so something else green like that would definitely not be tasty. Just couldn't be. But one day I was really hungry and I decided to eat the broccoli to fill me up. It was delicious! After that, I used to ask for everyone's broccoli as most of the kids didn't think it would taste good, either. I even asked my mom WHY we never had it at home. She said the family got tired of it. Meaning: the older girls must have because I had NEVER seen that on the dining room table at home. And here I was, years younger that they were and yet lumped into the same "like/dislike" mold. A good thing...my mom started buying broccoli and we had it for supper every once in a while.
Even though I wasn't really too keen on hot dogs, because I got sick on the Merry-Go-Round at a carnival once after eating a wiener on a bun, I loved meatless Friday because we often had Pigs in a Blanket. The wiener was cooked right into that delicious bread dough. The only bad thing? They never had mustard to put on the Pigs in a Blanket. Only ketchup. Wrong. Wrong! Wrong!! But the bread dough was more than enough to make up for the lack of mustard. I just ate the Pigs in a Blanket plain.
School lunch is also the place where I had fish sticks for the first time. I also liked those. Pizza was more like BeauJo's pizza--so much bread there was hardly any pizza ingredients. Just some seasoned tomato sauce and cheese. Still I thought it was pretty good. These were meatless Fridays because EVERYONE lived according to the Catholic rule. No meat on Friday--kind of like fasting. But I don't know that anyone ever gave a donation to the poor for having given up their portion of meat for one day in the week.
Mrs. Morton, who was the food supervisor, was a REAL nutritionist with a degree-- and the mother of a boy in the grade behind me. I was pretty impressed. She wasn't just some woman who was a good cook, she was a person who knew about nutrition, menus that included the right ingredients for healthy kids, and using the staples afforded by the government to make those meals. There was no soda pop. Just milk. And an extra carton of that was two cents.
If I remember correctly, the novelty of eating at the cafeteria wore off for most of the popular kids by the time we were seniors in high school. Thirty-five minutes didn't allow a lot of time to go anywhere too far away and grab a bite to eat. It was too far to drive home even. By then most of us were driving and had cars so there was an exodus at lunch period down to the little corner market in Sunnyside where the purchases were potato chips, candy bars, and pop. No nutrition in that diet! Plus, most of the girls were always "on a diet" anyway. And they were always hungry because they had skipped breakfast, too.
I was also so grateful to my mom for teaching me while growing up that breakfast was pretty important. She always said If you ate breakfast, your brain worked for school concentration and there wasn't always a gnawing in your stomach because you were hungry. I would get up on school days at 5:30 am, get ready for school, and practice the piano while my mom fixed my breakfast. Some days it might be pork steak and potatoes and gravy or something along those lines. Other days it might be tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches. Some days we actually had breakfast foods like waffles or pancakes, eggs, bacon, toast, and my favorite--Cream of Wheat.
So, when it was lunch time, I was ready to eat a nutritious meal. For the most part it was appetizing, too, and therefore not something that is related to negative feelings.
No memories related to bullying, snubbing, or bad behavior in the lunch room either. The teachers told us it was a privilege to eat there, and to a kid who had gone home every day of our school experience, instead of having to hoof it home or elsewhere for body fuel, the cafeteria was worth about FIVE Stars for me.
So, yeah. My memories of school lunch are good ones full of sights, sounds, and delicious food I can still see in my mind's eye. What a banquet!
BON APPETITE!
Mrs. Morton, who was the food supervisor, was a REAL nutritionist with a degree-- and the mother of a boy in the grade behind me. I was pretty impressed. She wasn't just some woman who was a good cook, she was a person who knew about nutrition, menus that included the right ingredients for healthy kids, and using the staples afforded by the government to make those meals. There was no soda pop. Just milk. And an extra carton of that was two cents.
If I remember correctly, the novelty of eating at the cafeteria wore off for most of the popular kids by the time we were seniors in high school. Thirty-five minutes didn't allow a lot of time to go anywhere too far away and grab a bite to eat. It was too far to drive home even. By then most of us were driving and had cars so there was an exodus at lunch period down to the little corner market in Sunnyside where the purchases were potato chips, candy bars, and pop. No nutrition in that diet! Plus, most of the girls were always "on a diet" anyway. And they were always hungry because they had skipped breakfast, too.
I was also so grateful to my mom for teaching me while growing up that breakfast was pretty important. She always said If you ate breakfast, your brain worked for school concentration and there wasn't always a gnawing in your stomach because you were hungry. I would get up on school days at 5:30 am, get ready for school, and practice the piano while my mom fixed my breakfast. Some days it might be pork steak and potatoes and gravy or something along those lines. Other days it might be tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches. Some days we actually had breakfast foods like waffles or pancakes, eggs, bacon, toast, and my favorite--Cream of Wheat.
So, when it was lunch time, I was ready to eat a nutritious meal. For the most part it was appetizing, too, and therefore not something that is related to negative feelings.
No memories related to bullying, snubbing, or bad behavior in the lunch room either. The teachers told us it was a privilege to eat there, and to a kid who had gone home every day of our school experience, instead of having to hoof it home or elsewhere for body fuel, the cafeteria was worth about FIVE Stars for me.
So, yeah. My memories of school lunch are good ones full of sights, sounds, and delicious food I can still see in my mind's eye. What a banquet!
BON APPETITE!
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