Lunch Hour

I spent the first six years of my public-school incarceration at a place called “Edith Beaver Elementary”. A part of the indoctrination forced upon us kids was the lunch hour routine — no talking in line, whispering only at the tables, and absolutely no loud laughing.

Back then, we actually had a lunch “hour” although the hour part was not for our benefit. Rather, it was for the teachers. We were given about twenty minutes to stuff our faces and then hustled out onto the hot, dusty playground to entertain ourselves beneath the watchful eyes of two spinster playground monitors.

Meanwhile, the teachers spent the remainder of the hour in the air-conditioned teachers’ lounge, smoking cigarettes, making fun of kids like me, and collaborating on evil schemes to suck the creativity and personality out of us. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn would have fit right in.

The cafeteria food was barely a step above jailhouse grub, but it was cheap. For forty-five cents, you could get whatever pseudo meat and semi-cooked vegetables they were serving that day. If you were miserly like me, you could spend just twenty-five cents and get a bowl of red beans with a cornbread muffin.

Although I only got to buy my lunch on Fridays, I always went for the beans — partially for the ensuing sound effects, but also to have money left over for dessert. Dessert was available in two forms. One was nasty cup-sized servings of jiggly, molded Jell-o in an assortment of carcogenicly dyed colors, and the other was Borden’s ice cream sandwiches.

I only purchased Jell-o once but I routinely went for the ice cream sandwiches. Small ice cream sandwiches cost a nickel while large ones cost a dime. Any fool could see that the small ones were way more than half the size of large ones, so I never understood how they ever sold anything except the small ones.

Once, I tried to spend my entire forty-five cents on small ice cream sandwiches, only to be severely reprimanded by the defrocked nun who ran the cash register. She’d traded in her black and white habit for a white cafeteria uniform, but she still retained the nunly hatred of kids. That great large beast of a woman lectured me that eating nine ice cream sandwiches would give me diarrhea and waste the school nurse’s time. Judging from her girth, I suspected she was trying to horde those ice cream sandwiches for herself.

Bending the Rules

By my sixth year of subservience, I’d managed to break nearly every lunchroom rule in the book — from loudly popping my brown paper lunch sack (a feat which nearly brought out the SWAT team) to placing that squiggly green Jell-o in the seat of the girl next to me (a prank which earned me a trip to the dreaded principal’s office). Hence, I was looking for new life experiences.

In the first few weeks of sixth grade, my friend, Britt, and I noticed that one of our classmates, Jimmy, peeled off from our cafeteria line and strolled casually out the front door of the building every day. At afternoon recess, we cornered and cross-examined him.

Jimmy informed us that his mom picked him up for lunch every day and that any kid in the school could bring a note from their parents, excusing them to go home for lunch. The game was afoot!

Within days, Britt had fabricated a type-written note on his mother’s personal stationery and obtained his daily parole. It took me a few weeks longer, but I eventually came up with a plausible “Get Out of Jail Free” note.

Amazingly, as strict as the rules were inside the Gulag, they apparently had no motivation to monitor what the escapees were up to during their time away.

Almost every lunch hour, we would ride our bikes to Britt’s house — mostly because his mother stocked better snacks than mine. We read comic books while we gorged because in those days, the only thing on mid-day TV was local news or soap operas.

Slam-Bang Theater with Three Stooges and Superman reruns didn’t come on until four o’clock and there weren’t even any cartoons to watch at noon. What did little kids do?

A Taste of Freedom
That Christmas, I got my Cushman motor scooter running, and although it still needed a paint job, that ugly carcass provided us with a bridge to the outside world. Once every week or so, I would park it beside the house of two brothers I knew who lived a block from our school. At noon, Britt and I would walk to their house and whisk away to see the world.

While I was still over two years away from getting a license to legally drive the scooter on public roads, we deemed it safe so long as we stuck to residential streets. After all, Garland only had about five police cars back then.

Just a mile from our school, where two major roads intersected, there was a large shopping center with everything a school kid could want for lunch. There was the Burger Chef where you could get a burger, small fries, and a coke for only sixty-five cents. There was also a Skillerns pharmacy with one of those old-timey candy counters where they scooped mounds of candy onto a scale with a little silver shovel.

They sold my favorite peanut M&Ms as well as jellybeans and “Hot Tamale” brand red-hots. By filling our pockets with those candies, we could resell the left-overs to other kids during afternoon recess and double our money.

If we wound through the Buddies Supermarket parking lot behind Burger Chef, we could cross one major street and reach the gold star of dining experiences — Panchos Mexican Buffet. We didn’t go there often, partially because of the risk, but also because of the high cost. A lunch buffet with coke and Sopapillas for desert would set you back $2.25, plus a dime tip for the waitress. Those were big people lunch prices!

All went well for several trips to that Mexican menagerie until one day when my dad exited his real estate office in that same shopping center and spied my scooter parked out front of Panchos. He strolled in and caught us red-handedly stuffing tacos into our mouths. The little flag on our table was already raised to get the waitress to bring the free Sopapillas.

Although my dad didn’t rat us out to my mom at dinner that night, he did warn me that the next time the scooter left the garage during school hours, he’d remove the carburetor and I’d be up a creek. We never again spent our lunch hour at the shopping center, but we did continue to stuff ourselves with Hostess Twinkies and Fritos at Britt’s house.

And, getting away with that noontime rule bending, only prepared us for the big show which would start the following Autumn in junior high.

A meeting of great minds who think alike