I'm constantly bombarded by reasons to eat food that is bad for me. Apparently the entire month of July is National Hot Dog Month, as proclaimed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in July 1956. So you got some catching up to do!!! By my math, if you're just getting started, you gotta eat 3 a day for the rest of the month. And on top of it, July is also National Ice Cream Month. *burp* All this prompted me to see if there is a National Salad Month. There is. It's May. Except that July 4 is National Caesar Salad Day, which makes no historical sense whatsoever. Et tu, croutons?
I'd bemoan the state of "our times," but this one has been around for 65 years!!! The great thing is that a hot dog from 1956 is still as edible as it was the day it was made.
I love hot dogs, too ! We used to stop at the little lunch counter when we went shopping at Sam’s Club, and they had a wonderful hot dog and drink special for around a dollar , which we used to enjoy a lot when we went there. They had all of the wonderful toppings,(ketchup, mustard, relish, mayonnaise) including sauerkraut, which I dearly love on a hotdog. I was thinking about that today when we were driving home from the fitness center, and wishing that we still did that; so when we went to the grocery store,I bought some sauerkraut. It is at least a nod towards the wonderful Sam’s Hot Dogs.
When I was a kid in Indiana, there was a car hop place called The Dog n' Suds. Hot dogs & root beer. *burp* As an adult working in DC, there was a sandwich shop-style place called Best of the Wurst. They had about every type of hot dog style & toppings you can imagine. Man, it was good.
Years ago, our local A&W Root Beer drive-in used to have a special every Thursday of coney-dogs, 5/$1. Thursday was also the auction sale day for our small North Idaho community; so after going to the sale, the kids and I would stop by and order $2-3 dollars worth of the coney dogs. It was something that we looked forward to every week, and usually bought some A&W Root Beer to have with our hot dog dinner that night.
I was just reading the story of Dog & Suds. At one time they had 650 locations. The franchise operation is gone but the brand lives on in 15 locations, in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. I had no idea they were that far-flung. Regarding your auction nights when hot dogs are on sale: You gotta love it when the stars align like that, unless it was a smart A&W owner knowing folks would be out on Thursday anyway. Great memories, huh?
The weekly auction sale was pretty much the main community even in Bonners Ferry, @John Brunner . It was at the local stockyards, and in the morning was the outside miscellaneous auction, and in the afternoon, the livestock auction started, whether or not the “junk auction” had ended or not. You could buy whole boxes of who-knows-what for a couple of dollars (you could look through the boxes before the auction started though), and then people took home their treasure boxes, went through and put the stuff they didn’t want into another box, which they added to their other sale stuff, and took it all back to the auction the next week. It was kind of like a community recycling center, and the auctioneer made a little money for doing the recycling. My kids would save up their quarters, and even they could sometimes bid on a box that had something they wanted, or thought they wanted. One time, I bought a milk goat, she seemed like a nice gentle goat when I got her. However, it turned out that she thought she could head-butt my kids just like she would have done with another goat that annoyed her; so back to the auction she went the next week ! The sales yard didn’t have any kind of food counter, so people had to go somewhere to get food , and the A&W had the coneys on sale, so they sold them about as fast as they could make them that day.
These stories always put a smile on my face. We had a place where people traded their junk with each other. You and I were way ahead of the recycling curve, except repurposing is way more environmental than recycling. And that goat...you became part of those in-the-know when that goat was put back on the block for the nth time, and everyone who went through their brief period of ownership got to sit back and watch the next sucker lucky winner take her home. You wonder how the auctioneer kept a straight face.
I just read an article about hot dog rounds: Invented by a butcher in New Jersey, these are hot dogs (and not thick bologna) in every way except their shape. The price is right, too: (16) 3 oz. rounds for $34 plus $25 shipping. That's roughly $3.75 each, or about $20/pound delivered. You can tell your friends there was an accident in the driveway as you were unloading the groceries...or that you should never drink while watching QVC. Order now so you get them in time for National Pervert A Tradition Month. That's in Septuary.
That's one of the last 15 or so left, and I believe it's an independent thing now. Corporate has gone away, but apparently hot dogs are forever.
I also love hot dogs, my first memories of eating hot dogs is at the ballpark Ebbets Field while watching the Brooklyn Dodgers play, we also had a great hot dog wagon nearby, of course if you went into New York City had to stop at nedicks for the hot dog and orange drink, their hot dog was put on a specially-made bread which resembled two slices of white bread attached together. Enjoyable memories and times.