Do you remember the school lunch room or cafeteria? This week I am working with a local school and we are meeting with the teachers in the cafeterias of each school. Today we are in an elementary school and as I sit on this little stool I am flooded with memories of my own lunch room in the 50’s and early 60’s. Our little lunch room was in a separate building from the classrooms. The inside of the little lunchroom was filled with long tables with little chairs along the sides. The walls were painted with different nursery rhyme pictures like Little Bow Peep and her Sheep, Humpty Dumpty on the wall, Little Black Sambo (wow would that be politically and racially unacceptable today), and the Pied Piper among others. I don’t know who had painted those murals but they were wonderful and livened up that little building. I can still see them in my mind’s eye. This building is industrial white with white and chrome tables with built in stools and white tile floors. Very white and very clean!
What is the most impressive is the fragrance of the baking bread that is flooding my senses. Is there anything more wonderful than the smell of fresh baking bread? I love the schools hot rolls with real butter, not margarine. I also think I smell corn and maybe potatoes cooking. It is 8:53 am and the lunch ladies are hard at it. I can see thru the kitchen and they all have on pink polo type shirts and navy blue bib aprons. Of course they all have on those very attractive hair nets but these ladies are young and slender. Not like Mrs. Wade, my lunch lady. She was as big around as she was tall and she always wore a white uniform with a white apron and her grey hair was covered with the “net”. She was gruff and she was in charge. When you went through the line and you saw that the meal was beans, cornbread and spinach and you said “Yuck, spinach!” She would thoroughly scold you and heap more spinach on your plate. If you said “Yea, we are having stew”, then she would give you what appeared to be less stew and more cornbread. Maybe that was just my perception but it sure seemed to be that way.
My grandmother was a teacher in that elementary school and so I always stayed after school and rode home with her. That usually meant that I got to play in areas of the school that I wasn’t allowed to be in otherwise. I even got to go out to the lunchroom occasionally. I soon learned that Mrs. Wade was a really nice person “after school”. She would give me left over cake or cobbler and sometimes even heat up a hot roll and put some butter on it. What a treat! I grew to love Mrs. Wade over my 7 years in grade school, kindergarten through 6th grade.
Today I am thinking about Mrs. Wade, Grandma, and some of the others that fed and nurtured all those little children in that pink lunchroom with the nursery rhyme wall paintings. (((deep breath))) Ah, love the smell of that fresh baked bread!
7 Comments
December 3, 2008 at 4:44 am
From the way you made it sound in other comments, I would’ve thought you had class in a cave.
You are NOT going to be receiving anything from Santa after that remark!
December 3, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Oh, our cafeteria lady was mean! She stood over you and made you eat the stuff you didn’t like… her name was Ms. Comfort…. but she certainly offered no comfort. Mean mean woman.
Di
The Blue Ridge Gal
I probably would have puked if someone stood over me and made me eat something I didn’t like. Stress does that to me! Ms. Comfort……..what a name for a mean lunch lady!:D
December 3, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Great memories. I seem to remember getting into lots of trouble in the lunch room and having my food taken away from me, which was the point…the food was horrible!
I don’t remember much awful food but when my kids were in elementary school they had something they called “ALPO”. One day I had to pick one of them up and they were in the lunchroom and sure enough the gross stuff in their plates looked like dog food. It was some mixture of ground beef, chopped potatoes, a few carrots and it was really runny but not a soup. Yuck! I let them take their lunch from then on.
December 4, 2008 at 12:04 am
FYI! I have no idea what caused the script at the beginning of this post………………
December 4, 2008 at 3:07 am
I’m with you. My school lunch memories are all good. Most of our lunch ladies were farmers’ wives and they knew how to cook. Soft fluffy yeast rolls warm with butter, blonde brownies, mashed potatoes and chicken noodles (like my cousin QTPie makes) Yummo!
Yummo is right! Makes my mouth water just thinking about it.
December 4, 2008 at 3:50 am
The only meal I absolutely hated in that same lunch room was spinach. I couldn’t stomach that stuff and especially not after Mrs. Diltz made Linda W. eat all hers and then she threw it all back up on the table in front of us. All I could do was stare and gag. LOL But I did love that Little Black Sambo mural the best and can still picture it.
*sigh*
Well, I guess Linda showed Mrs. Diltz, didn’t she! I would have lost my cookies if someone had thrown up on the table. YUCK! Can you imagine painting a Little Black Sambo mural in the school today. Whoa!
December 4, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Such memories you invoke! I recall Mrs. Campbell. Round and plump in her white uniform & apron, complete with hairnet. My favorite lunch was the days we would have hamburgers. They would cook the burger all crumbled up (rather than in patties) and I remember her using an ice cream scoop to scoop a heap of burger on our buns. Don’t know why, but I loved those!
Those lunch ladies must have done a bunch of sampling to gain that perfect round figure! You can always judge a cook by the size of those she feeds…..