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Bologna Time

It’s time for the back to school advertisements—clothes, backpacks, notebooks, pencils. But for me, as I look back over the decades, back to school also meant back to something else: bologna sandwiches. I loved them; I had them nearly every day, unless we had inadvertently run out of bologna at home. I couldn’t wait for lunch to eat my sandwich.

In junior high I started munching from my lunch bag, surreptitiously stashed in my desk, way before lunch period, usually in Mr. Moreau’s French class. He noticed; he asked me if I were starving; he told me to put the sandwich away. I did until his back was turned and I could sneak another bite. (I never, by the way, got a good grade in French. I switched to Latin, an afternoon class, the following year. My bologna sandwich was long gone by that time.)

I had late lunch the year I took French, a better if hungrier option than early lunch, which started at 10:40 and would have more appropriately been called late breakfast, or more fashionably, brunch. Whatever it was called, I still had bologna.

Not that my bologna sandwich would have been familiar to anyone eating in a school lunchroom today. The bologna came from a supermarket shrink pack, not deli sliced. It was spongy, grayish pink, and so round it slopped over the edges of the bread crust. Miracle Whip was the condiment that glued it in place. And the bread was not whole grain, not fiber enriched, not protein boosted. It was soft, white, and squishy; pressing down with a finger left a permanent indentation on its puffy surface. If you took a small bread piece, compressed it, and rolled it into a ball, it could be thrown like a spitball at an unsuspecting classmate. The boys did that in the cafeteria; the girls were more genteel eaters.

As for the bread itself, advertising assured mothers it was building strong youthful bodies eight ways. (Some years later, they found four more benefits and advertised the bread as building stronger bodies 12 ways—but I didn’t get those extra benefits.) Anyway, about those eight ways, that’s what Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob Smith told me and the millions of other youngsters who watched faithfully at 5:30 on the local NBC channel.

Howdy was a wonder, of course, but then so was television, so new a form of entertainment that not everybody in the neighborhood yet had a set. It was understood that any kid without a television had a legitimate claim to sit in the living room of a television-equipped home almost at will. In fact, I remember, before my parents had succumbed to what they thought would be a passing fad, going to a neighbor’s house to watch the Milton Berle Show, a treat not only for all the cream pies in the face, but because I got to stay up late on Tuesdays, until 9 o’clock, to see the whole program.

When we finally did get a set, my father insisted on doing something none of our neighbors had done. He put our set in our sort-of finished basement. (We had a couple of wicker basket chairs and a Formica-topped table from the restaurant my uncle Manny once owned.) Our neighbors installed their televisions in the place of honor the new technology deserved, the center of the living room. The sets were made for prominent display with cabinets that boasted styles like French provincial, Italian Renaissance, and Queen Anne.

But back to bologna, which is, of course, the trigger to a cascade of memories, like Madeleines for Proust. Somewhere along in high school, I gave it up. By then calories beat taste and I opted for my mother putting a container of cottage cheese in my lunch bag. But the thought of eating it was so depressing that I just left the bag in my locker and bought a hero roll with butter in the cafeteria. I often forgot to throw out the cottage cheese until my locker reeked of rotting dairy. Then, I tried to pretend it wasn’t mine. That didn’t fool my homeroom teacher. He made me clean up the whole odiferous mess.

Now I have salads at lunch, often with the new icons of nutrition like kale. I watch calories; I eat healthy; I go to the gym. I have not gone back to bologna. Sometimes a cherished memory doesn’t match up to reality, so I’ll leave bologna sandwiches in the land of treasured tastes, where they lodge right next to the toasted almond ice cream pops that I bought from the Good Humor truck every summer afternoon.