I went to high school in the late 1960s. My high school, Marshall-University, close to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, was integrated by court order in 1969 -- but segregation lingered on in the school cafeteria.
You either got the hot cafeteria lunch or you brown bagged it. The students who enjoyed a hot lunch were seated in the airy and spacious portion of the cafeteria, with wide clean tables and comfortable chairs -- the padded kind they had in the school library. The brown baggers were relegated to a drab and airless alcove stocked with dispirited gate leg tables that tipped listlessly to one side. Cobwebs hung from the flickering neon lights overhead. The chairs were splintery wooden relics dating from the Dakota War of 1862. There were cracks running around the concrete floor that formed a rough map of Antarctica, if you peered at them long enough. And since I was one of the brown baggers, I had plenty of opportunity to trace out the outlines of the Ross Ice Shelf and the Weddell Sea.
My mother did not believe in spending seventy-five-cents each day on a hot cafeteria meal for her children. Not when a loaf of Wonder Bread cost a quarter and a huge wedge of Oscar Mayer beef bologna cost just under a dollar. My sandwich featured no sort of window dressing, either. A smear of oleo margarine was it. Lettuce? Tomato? Ikke en sjanse. Along with the sandwich, which never varied the entire time I was in high school, she included an apple and a Twinkie or Hostess cupcake. While mom was a dab hand at picking out most produce down at the Red Owl each week, she never seemed able to select a decent crispy apple. Mine were always mealy and brown.
There was no use in complaining to my mother about the monotony and blandness of my bag lunch. Such complaints met with a loud snort, followed by a spirited discourse on how she grew up eating a piece of stale bread smeared with bacon grease and then covered with scallions when they were in season for her lunch. Did I wish to emulate her harsh childhood tiffin? It could be arranged . . .
I did, however, receive a quarter each day to buy a small carton of chocolate milk at the cafeteria. But that did not allow me to sit with the 'in' crowd. I tried doing it -- we all tried, us brown baggers, but were immediately put in our place not only by the smug and supercilious expressions of the warm lunch gang, but even more so by the teachers who patrolled the lunchroom -- I remember Mr. Patten, the algebra teacher, asking me in a tone of voice that brooked no contradiction if I wouldn't feel more comfortable sitting with the other kids who brought their lunches from home. I meekly agreed and scurried back to my place.
Just exactly why this unjust separation existed, I have no idea. Some of the brown baggers I ate with explained in hoarse whispers that the school made a huge profit off of each hot lunch they sold -- the graft was tremendous, and financed teacher trips to Jamaica and the Riviera. So naturally we students who chose not to subsidize this boondoggle were tossed into outer darkness with our baloney sandwiches and hard boiled eggs. But these were the same pimpled rumor mongers who also claimed you got VD from sitting on the wrong toilet seat.
Nowadays, a half century later, I will still make myself a bologna sandwich for lunch on occasion -- but you can bet your bippy I gussy it up with sourdough bread spread with plenty of aioli and stacked with slices of red beefsteak tomato and romaine lettuce, not to mention a bakers dozen of Kalamata olives on the side. And I have found nothing better for dessert in the intervening years than a good old Twinkie. But don't tell my doctor . . .
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"I prefer braunschweiger."
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