Wayne Boatwright wrote:
> On Wed 25 Jun 2008 05:20:21a, George Shirley told us...
>
>> CC wrote:
>>> "George Shirley" > wrote in message
>>> ...
>>>> l, not -l wrote:
>>>>> On 24-Jun-2008, Nancy2 > wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> According to the NASCAR folks, fried bologna (baloney) is a Virginia
>>>>>> thing. Is that right?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> N.
>>>>> As a child growing up in western Kentucky in the late-40s and
>>>>> throughout the
>>>>> 50s, we often ate fried b'loney. Sometimes as a sandwich (on white
>>>>> bread slathered with mayo), more often as a meal's meat dish when
> times
>>>>> were lean
>>>>> (my dad was an autoworker and was laid off often until he accrued
>>>>> quite a
>>>>> few years of service). Fried baloney with eggs and toast for
> breakfast,
>>>>> fried baloney and mush for lunch, pintos and buttered white bread for
>>>>> dinner. Heck, sometimes we even had creamed strips of fried baloney
> on
>>>>> toast.
>>>>>
>>>> My Dad loved his baloney, had to be the type still in the sausage
>>>> shape with the red cover. He would slice it thick. Favorite sandwich
>>>> was a quarter inch slice of baloney, equal amount of white onion,
> black
>>>> pepper, and the bread had to have mustard on it. Carried that or an
> olive
>>>> loaf sandwich in his lunch bucket for 40 years. He also ate deviled ham
>>>> and vienna sausage on a regular basis. the only thing he ate that I
>>>> liked, and still like, was sardines on a cracker with a little mustard.
>>>> Dad ate fried salt pork most mornings for breakfast, I could never
>>>> stomach the stuff myself.
>>> George, sounds like your father may have been a coal miner, My
>>> grandfather and
>>> father was for several years till he left that for something else.They
>>> were the only
>>> ones I remember calling their lunch box a lunch bucket. It looked like
>>> an aluminum
>>> bucket with wire handle, about 8" round, came in three pieces. bottom
>>> held water
>>> for drinking and ice, if they had it, to keep the top part cool where
>>> their sandwiches
>>> were kept, always wrapped in wax paper and a top over it all that fit
>>> down snug to
>>> keep the inside clean and free of coal dust.
>>> CC
>> My Dad went to work in an oil refinery at age fifteen. Prior to that he
>> worked as a teamster on a 20-mule team that drew a stone sledge in
>> Central Louisiana, that was from age twelve to fourteen. At fourteen
>> they moved to Beaumont, Texas and Dad became the chief lumber grader for
>> the Neches Lumber Company. He was to small to flip the timbers so had
>> some big laborers to do it for him. He worked in the refinery from 1926
>> until 1 January 1967. He retired at age 55 with over 40 years service
>> and there were some other men who retired with him who were two or three
>> years younger than he was.
>>
>> I followed him into the oil patch in 1961 and always called the steel
>> container I carried my lunch in a bucket also. Just habit I guess as Dad
>> said his first lunch bucket was a 3-lb lard bucket that had been well
>> scrubbed. I still have his plastic lunch bucket with his name painted on
>> the lid, wouldn't take anything for it.
>
> My parents and their siblings were all raised on farms in MS and went to
> country schools. They all carried their lunches to school in "molasses
> buckets". Those were probably about the same size as a 3-lb lard bucket.
> Lunch was usually some kind of fried meat, biscuits, and fresh fruit. I
> think they drank water from the well at school.
>
Dad used to tell the story about seeing all the kids at the school in
town eating white bread and bologna for lunch. All he and his sibs had
was a lard bucket with some smoked ham on cold biscuits. One day they
traded with a town kid but never made that mistake again. He said the
school he went to had a spring house where they got their water and kept
their buckets cool. He rode to school on the "school bus", a mule drawn
wagon with a bench down each side of the wagon the length of the wagon.
Also used to tease me by telling me how tough it was walking to school
barefoot, in the snow, ten miles each way, all of it uphill. Took me a
few years to figure out he was pulling my leg.