Boreas has returned, waving the treetops at me. It is 11:27 a.m. and 21 with a wind chill of 7, but I'm warm enough. I just finished candying some pineapple, dried cherries and cranberries supposed to be cherry-flavored, dates, blueberries, and toasted my last pecans. The dried-out dates, pecans, the last of the frozen huge blueberries were from the large quantities I get from our food co-op, which last quite a time for a singler like me. The rest I bought yesterday after I went into sticker shock again at the prices of candied fruit. The maraschino cherries I candied last year were not to be found; in their place were candied cherries at $7.79. I am cheap. So I'm concocting my own version of my favorite sour cream fruitcake, and now I have to wait for the egg whites to warm to room temperature. I also made myself a blueberry-banana-yogurt smoothie for lunch and sauteed two boxes of mushrooms and some onions for a pizza tomorrow. I love the pizza dough my Hitachi Automatic Home Baker (breadmaker) makes, for which I use half wheat flour, half white, with wheat germ. With six tiny stents corkscrewing open blood vessels on my heart, I do ordinarily eat good food, the opposite of fast food. The fruitcake is merely a seasonal weakness and one I share with my brother-in-law. And for all the fruitcake ammo jokes, mine are moist.
So I'm warmed up with my kitchen--should have the computer out there--as I think of the socially warmest place in Center in the 1940s and 1950s, Mary's Cafe. It was warm on a day like today anyway, because she rose early to bake her popular pies and then, in winter, to prepare possibly a large stock pot of soup, though she had Campbell's Soup for use anytime. Mary Ellingson was a relatively tall, happy woman with an infectious laugh who enjoyed her popularity and could share gossip with the women and dirty jokes with the men while deftly keeping the busy place in motion. Her husband, Joe, once a barber, was a grumpy old loafer with a cane who sat out on the front bench in the warm seasons, monitoring town traffic. They had a wooden trailer out back where they had reared their three daughters, Mae (Bogner), Pauline (Grant), and Gladys (Covolik), married with families when I was a child. Mary and Joe lived out of a back bedroom-tiny bathroom walled off from the cafe proper. I called her my second mother because, when Mom, a country school teacher, was down at Wayne Normal (State Teachers College) for summer school, Mary looked after me from across the street, Dad too busy to do much watching. Town women at the time felt perfectly free to watch over or scold or spank any children, part of the larger all-one-big-family village webwork, and Mary felt even freer with me. She's the one I went to with questions, with or without Dad's permission; and once, when I tripped over a rock and cut my knee badly on a broken 7-Up bottle so that it looked like a split sausage, I ran shocked over to her, and she wrapped it in a cold, wet towel and wiped my tears while Dad got the car to take me to Dr. Kohtz in Bloomfield. She and Mrs. Ernie Sandoz, Minnie, who lived across the street from us and was as diminutive and genteel as Mary was big-boned, hearty, and sometimes brusque, were the only two older women who insisted I bring them May baskets and the only two, accordingly, to chase me and catch me to kiss me soundly, though Mary had to run around Dad's gas pumps a few times to do it. She also said I would end up a movie star, a very bad prediction but highly pleasing flattery for a shy little boy.
Her cafe with its brick-imprinted tin front painted white sat next to Freddie's Store, our biggest supermarket I have dealt with before, both directly across Main Street from Dad's filling station-garage. Freddie's was at the north end of the central block on the west side, the Post Office anchoring the other end; Dad's place was on the east side, where my brother-in-law still has his welding shop, though the buildings have changed several times over the decades. The space between Mary's and Freddie's was too small for only a small child to squeeze into, but the south side of Mary's had a small alley between her and the next-door bar-pool hall, one of several narrow alleys we whooped through, though her side had a row of spearmint under her kitchen windows--coincidentally as Mrs. Sandoz had along the front of her house. Brushing against it set off the scent, and I loved chewing the leaves.
I hesitated about naming Mary's Cafe Gossip Central because, assuredly, Mom brought home plenty when she worked at the county courthouse, but my main hesitation was about Dad's shop. Very much like Nathan Detroit's "The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York" in Guys and Dolls, Dad always had card players. Initially they were in the front office part, playing over the counter, usually cribbage but sometimes euchre or pitch with Grandpa Luckert; later they migrated to the back of the garage around a cable-spool table, then card table, all of which meant Dad's pockets usually held plenty of change. Anyone from a small town knows men are gossips quite as much as women, sometimes more so. And bawdier about it without lowering their voices to whisper in moral shock. Considering that Dad would come home at noontime for dinner--city people lunch, their dinner our supper--and tell me whom I danced with the night before at, say, Bloomfield or Niobrara, I'm inclined to want to nominate his place for the title. For now we'll leave it at Mary's.
Ma Cain served meals at the hotel, and Mabel Ellingson did some short orders like frying hamburgers at her husband's--Charlie Ellingson's--little bar with its single gas pump out front at the south end of Main Street; but if you wanted a hamburger--for a quarter then--with maybe dill pickles and onion or, at another nickel or dime, even lettuce and tomato or not, pop at a nickel and then--gasp!--a dime in corrugated Nehi bottles out of a red cooler full of iced water, or the best pie besides what our mothers made and several kinds my mother didn't make like wonderful sour cream raisin or date cream or lemon merengue or pecan, not to mention the usual apple, cherry, pumpkin, peach, best a la mode, of course, the scoop of ice cream a nickel extra: if you wanted those, you went to Mary's. She made a really good tuna salad sandwich, which I liked better than the egg salad. The entrees were listed on the menu, written daily, also on a chalk board, I think, as she served hamburger steak, hot beef sandwiches, boiled ham, turkey, pork chops, roast beef, chicken fried steak, with her own mashed potatoes and then canned vegetables like peas or carrots or corn. But she also was constantly searching for novelties, so we all first had corn dogs there, skewered hot dogs fried in a cornmeal dough. She served good sundaes in heavy tulip dishes--I liked the Hershey chocolate syrup liberally drizzled--and better banana splits in heavy boat dishes.
She had the food monopoly, even though some of the courthouse people and, of course, traveling salesmen ate at the hotel. I was forbidden to go into the pool hall, a place of vice out of The Music Man, except to ask Dad something or retrieve him--a teetotaler but an avid billiards player--if he was across the street there, though ordinarily he would take his coffee breaks at Mary's. But I'm making the point that her place, open for longer hours than the hotel, was the communal eating center and morally safe in a town where the Drys regularly, indignantly outvoted the Wets--how times have changed--as to whether the bars could be open after midnights or on Sundays.
She also had an upright piano in the back corner topped with an orangeish velour shawl with knotted fringe, on which sat senior photos of her daughters and two large stuffed horned owls she could set rocking with "The Blackhawk Waltz" or any of the other sheet music in her piano bench. Elaine LaFrenz (Darling--just celebrated their 50th anniversary) could likewise play up a storm with showy, catchy piano solos like "Nola" or "The 12th Street Rag" or "Kitten on the Keys" or for happy singing sessions led by Mom, a lovely alto with Ethel Merman vocal power, who did a wonderfully hammy "Chloe." We'd move the big circular table and its chairs back and gather around, reading over Elaine's shoulders when we didn't already know the lyrics, but "Beautiful Ohio," "The Missouri Waltz," "Ain't We Got Fun," "Bye Bye, Blackbird," "The Dark Town Strutters Ball" most of us knew. Those pre-Mitch Miller singalongs would happen most often in the summertime after choir practice when everyone was warmed up and it was a slow night at the cafe, which soon attracted listeners magnetized by the music.
Ooops. It's time to go make the fruitcake. I'll get back to the cafe and its floor plan next time.
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