Remembering Those Down-Home Plate Lunches!

This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in Images for East Bernard Tribune, East Bernard, Texas, 14 July 2022.

          In these difficult economic times, I am thankful for Dairy Queen, a fast-food eatery that is still affordable when you feel the need to “eat out.” But I still miss the old-fashioned affordable “plate lunches” you could buy in the 1940s and early 1950s in small towns and at Five and Dime lunch counters in large cities.

          My parents did not take us out to eat very often, but when they did, it was to small town cafes that served “down-home” plate lunches. When I worked in Austin for a short time, I often ate at lunch counters in Five and Dime stores, where they also served “down-home” plate lunches, a godsend to a country boy who felt uncomfortable in fancy restaurants.

          “Plate lunches” that tasted like home-cooked eating actually originated in Louisiana at the turn of the century. These “plate lunches” consisted of home-cooked meals on paper plates, boxed and delivered by special delivery vehicles. But I ate them in the 1940s in rural cafes and in city dime stores in the early 1950’s.

          I am guessing that the advent of fast-food chains brought about the demise of the old-fashioned plate lunch. Although the first fast food chain, White Castle, opened in Wichita, Kansas in 1921, and Dairy Queen opened in Joliet, Illinois in 1940, I don’t remember any fast-food eateries in Lee County in the 1930s and 1940s.

          Sonic did not come into existence until 1953, Burger King in 1954, MacDonald’s in 1955, and Wendy’s in 1969.

          It looks like the plate-lunch era ended with the beginning of the 1970s, not because the taste of down-home cooking wasn’t liked, but because fast service was becoming a desired way of life, — drive-by bank windows, drive-through dry-cleaning service, even drive-up grocery pick-up, — long before COVID came along.

          Like most folks, by the 1970s, I seemed to be in a hurry all the time, and I valued these fast service options, too, not that I really needed to be in such a hurry (fast-paced living may have even been an escape from life). It was about 1971 that I did an about face.

          Having bought a small house in Wharton, I was still a bachelor and felt so rushed I ate donut shop breakfasts standing up. Then one day I came home from teaching, approached my tiny front porch, and looked up. There, before me, cascading on a l large trellis were hundreds of yellow roses in full bloom! Wow! The first time since I bought the house that I had ever noticed the roses! The shock of the beauty of the cascading flowers was an awakening!

          From that day henceforth, I took a vow to slow down and see and smell the roses. I had been too busy to have a life. That was 1971. By the end of 1972, I was engaged, and on July 28, 1973, I married the love of my life. By 1982, I was taking the time to pull two little daughters in a coaster wagon around and around the block every day!

          Life is much, much slower, and more relaxing these days, although we still enjoy a Smokehouse kolache for breakfast every now and then, and a Dairy Queen hamburger for lunch occasionally. Still long for those old-fashioned plate lunches!

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Ray Spitzenberger is a retired Wharton County Junior College teacher, a retired Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.