Hot Dogs

I found this photo online of the original Ted's hot dog stand. I remember going there a few times with my Grandparents and the thing I remember the most was the sand flies who seemed to get on everything. You had to eat in the car lest you'd be ingesting this annoying little bugs.

The hot dogs I most remember from Buffalo were from the cafe that served Texas Red Hots in downtown. My grandmother would take my brother and I to a movie and the after show treat was hot dogs. I still remember the chili sauce (but not really a chili dog). It was a hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon, which probably led to my later love of greasy spoon dining. You can't beat authenticity. Then there was the desperate hot dog meal of my teens, grill a hot dog over the gas burner on the stove and eat it on a slice of white bread.

The classic Buffalo hot dog (as served by Ted's) is grilled over an open flame. The meat itself is a combination of pork and beef, pork being the first thing on the ingredients list. You can get the regular version or the foot long always served with fries. Condiments are up to you, and if you want you can douse the fries in vinegar instead of ketchup. That makes them pommes frites like the French Canadians eat. No poutine thank you.

Now imagine when I moved to Chicago I was confronted with a hot dog that my Mom termed a "boiled weiner". Chicago dogs are usually all beef and steamed or yes, boiled in a vat of water. The trick is to not overcook the dog so that the casing still has a bit of a snap when you bite into it. The proper Chicago dog is dressed with mustard, chopped onions, relish, tomato, a pickle slice and little "sport" peppers. The dog is served on a poppy seed bun and the finishing touch is celery salt sprinkled on the top of. The thing you will not find on a Chicago dog is ketchup because that is considered heresy. The tomato is the closest think you'll get to red stuff on the dog. Ketchup on the fries is A-OK and you won't find a bottle of vinegar anywhere.

My favorite Chicago hot dog joint was Tony's. Tony began selling hot dogs from a cart, and when he decided to go big time he moved his cart into a store front and sold food outside the front window. I survived on Tony's dogs and greasy fries through most of college. Two other things you find served in Chicago that you won't find in Buffalo are Polish sausages and Tom Tom tamales. Tom Tom tamales bear no semblance of actual Mexican tamales, but they're often the first tamale many Chicagoans were first familiar with before actual authentic Mexican tamales hit the scene.

The Polish is usually not steamed but cooked over a open flame grill, or just tossed into a deep fryer to get the crusty blackened casing so beloved by connoisseurs a cased meats. Served on a steamed poppy seed bun its usual dressing is grilled onions, mustard, sport peppers and a pickle.

The Chicago dog had its origins on Maxwell Street, an open air market of Jewish peddlers, often referred to as a "thieves market". The two purveyors of the dog that conquered Chicago are Jim's and the Express Grill who not only popularized the humble tube steak but also set the color palate for every hot dog stand in the city, red and yellow. One thing you won't find on a original Maxwell dog is relish or tomatoes. Onions (raw or grilled), mustard and sport peppers. Fries of course, nothing fancy. The additional elements have been added by other hot dog peddlers over the years to create what has become known as the classic dog. Some have added so many ingredients that the hot dog has been overwhelmed by the salad bar that's been tossed on top of it.

Almost every hot dog stand in the city advertises that they serve "Original Maxwell Street" food. There is also the grilled pork chop sandwich served with fried onions on a couple of slabs of white bread. Eat your heart out Buffalo we know how to live large.

The other sandwich Chicago claims as its own is the Italian beef, sweet or hot peppers, dipped or dry. I'll take a beef on weck any day with a dab of horseradish. I will be making my annual trek back to Buffalo (well, Depew actually) to visit Mom and family. We always go to Ted's.

Stanley Daruszka

Stanley was my paternal Grandfather and somewhat of an enigma to me.  As much as I have warm thoughts and memories about my maternal Grandfather Benny, I could not say the same for Stanley.  He was not a warm man, in fact he sort of scared me.  I don't have any memories of happy times or vacations with the family.  I do remember riding in the car with him once and not wanting to be there.  It's not that he was abusive or cruel, he just lacked warmth.

What I know of his childhood could explain some of this.  He was the youngest of 9 children born to Martin and Anna Daruszka.  Anna would die in 1904, the same year Stanley was born.  Her death caused the family to be broken up with the children sent to live with different relatives until Martin remarried.  His marriage was to a woman who was characterized by family members as an "evil stepmother".  His father Martin would die when Stanley was 6.  It is easy to guess that someone who grew up without the love of a mother and father could be molded into the emotionless man he would become.  One emotion my Father said he did have was anger, raging anger.

Stanley married my father's mother Wanda around 1925.  Like her mother before her, she died when she was 41.  At some point Stanley took to drinking.  He remained employed as a railroad conductor throughout the Depression but drank most or all of his paycheck.  My father had to hide money from his part-time job in order to keep his siblings fed.  Stanley would rage and demand the money he knew my father hid.  I suspect it also included physical abuse as an inducement.  My father left for the service in World War II sometime after his mother's death.  Upon his return he discovered Stanley had remarried, and his gruff introduction of her to my father was, "This is your new mother and you will call her mother."

Needless to say the relationship between father and son was not the best.  Perhaps some of my feelings for Stanley came from what passed as a relationship between father and son.  My most vivid memory of Stanley came at one of the holiday gatherings at his house.  As kids we were accustomed to being kissed and kissing other relatives.  I went to kiss Stanley and he slapped me across the face and told me, "Real men don't kiss" or something to that effect.

At this point in his life diabetes had begun to take its toll on him.  He lost both his legs below the knees and was confined to a wheelchair.  He would eventually lose his eyesight as well.  He had been warned to change his habits to prevent the disease from ravaging him.  My father said he was too damn stubborn and knew more than the doctors.  His plight only embittered him further.

Stanley died in 1971 while I was away at college in Chicago.  I had moved off campus and we did not have a phone in our apartment.  I had left the number of a neighbor's phone to call in case of an emergency.  They never relayed the message about his death.  I found out when I got an angry letter from my mother telling me that I had missed his funeral.  I casually told her I wouldn't have come anyways.  I felt no love for the man.

Ironically the man he told to accept his new wife as his mother would be the one who would treat her as he would have his own.  My parents would run errands for her, drove her around and were constant visitors at the senior home she was in.  He did it not because he felt compelled, but because he became a better man than his father.

Ruminations on a Birthday

I came into this world in the early morning of November 1st, 1950.  I was born at Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, NY.  The hospital is gone, but I'm still here.

I'm at the point in my second or third childhood were I start thinking adult thoughts about death and adult diapers.  I have reached the age at which point my paternal Grandfather died.  I have exceeded my maternal Grandfather's timeline by two years.  I guess that makes me a winner, although I still have a ways to go to reach my Dad's expiration date.

I had no big plans for the day.  No parties, no fancy dinner, just another day.  A phone call from Mom, Facebook well wishes from my brother and a few friends, Happy Birthday sung by my wife early this morning.  Like I told an elderly gentleman I held the door for at the Post Office as he hobbled in, at least we're ambulatory and that sometimes is the best thing one can wish for.  I found out a former coworker, younger than myself, had passed away.  I'm glad not to be a Facebook post accompanied by nice things said by people who hardly knew me.  I've watched friends and family die and I have no wish to join them anytime soon.  I have some minimal choices in the matter; like trying to eat healthier in order to prevent the things that seem to hasten the demise of the male heirs in my family.  Yet there is no way to prognosticate your end, just hope that its postponed to a day that will be determined sometime in the unforeseeable future.

67 isn't really old, unless you're in your twenties or thirties.  Then it seems ancient.  I never imagined myself being 67 when I was younger.  Both my Grandfathers died before I was 21.  I could not contemplate or imagine finding myself at that point.  I couldn't have imagined spending 30 years at the railroad.  I always wanted to be an artist of some sort, and I was fortunate enough to have a crack at it a few times.  Those are times and memories to be cherished.  The railroad part of my life came in two pieces.  The first came out of a desire to live out a young boy's fantasy that lasted 12 years.  The second came out of desperation when the art career never quite panned out.  That lasted until I retired at 62.  I enjoyed that work too, and I was good at it.  The hours were long and I sacrificed much of a life outside of work to do it, but the reward of a decent pension make that sacrifice seem worthwhile.  I am four years into a new life where I can pursue the creative parts of me that the railroad couldn't kill.

Along the way, even with the railroad, I was able to keep the flame of creativity going.  I was always able to do something that fed that fire.  I have a great deal I am proud of and can look back without regret and say that I did the best I could, not matter what I did, given the circumstances.  We all have regrets about the other choices we might have made, but I prefer to think I played the best game with the cards that were dealt.  I married a decent, loving and understanding woman who has tolerated and supported me.  What more can one ask for.

Tomorrow I will go the breakfast with a group of railroad retirees, many who are significantly older than me.  Its nice to hang out with a bunch of old railroad farts who can tell stories and laugh about the life they left behind.  I hope to be going to many more breakfasts as our ranks are replenished by new retirees and I can become an old fart too.

Uncle Leonard

Uncle Leonard (actually my Great Uncle) was my Grandfather Arendt's brother, and is the man on the right in this photo.  I didn't know Leonard, and only met him once by accident.  My brother and I spent a great deal of time at my Grandparent's house due the fact that both our parents worked.  Their house backed up to Houghton Park, with a yard was filled with my Grandfather's roses.

One summer day my brother and I were in the back yard when a man came up to the fence and motioned us to come to the fence that separated they yard from the park.  Before we got to the fence my Grandmother came storming out of the house and yelled for us to get indoors.  She went to the fence, spoke briefly with the man and he went away.  "Don't ever talk to that man again", my Grandmother warned, "he's a bum."

We knew all about bums.  Bums were men who lived by the railroad tracks at the far end of the park.  They did horrible things to little boys who wandered in to their wild domain of overgrown weeds and trees.  We would get all sorts of dire warnings from my Grandmother.  We couldn't go to bathroom when she took us to the movies in downtown Buffalo.  Her reasoning was that black boys lurked in the bathroom and would cut the "pee pees" off little white boys.  I'm always amazed how much of my childhood revolved around the terrible horrors that lurked in the shadows and would befall unsuspecting little boys.

Needless to say we never saw the bum again.  The truth to his identity would not be revealed until I started family history research.  Leonard was a happy guy by all accounts.  When he came home from military service in World War II he was a changed man.  He turned to alcohol in what today would be considered a classic symptom of self-medication for PTSD.  Leonard was not a bum who lived in the mythic hobo village that existed to scare little children.  He lived with various relatives and friends around Kaisertown.  My grandparents fed him and gave him money.  He would show up at the fence for hand-outs periodically.  We happened to be in the yard when he made one of his visits.

Leonard died in 1966 and there was never any mention in the family about his death.  I don't know if anyone from our part of the family attended the funeral.  He was not among the collection of mass cards my mother kept of family members who passed.  My mother, who claims to remember very little about family history, doesn't have much to say about him.  My family is full of mysteries and conveniently forgotten stories about the people who came before me.  Much of the information I have gleaned has come from other relatives outside of my immediate family.

I often envy people who have kept intimate records of their family's history and can trace their lineage back for many generations.  In our family, forgetting the past seems to be like a band-aid put over the wounds of painful memories.

Buck Benny

My parents on their wedding day, my Grandfather behind them with a shotgun.

My maternal Grandfather, Bernard Arendt, went by the sobriquet of "Buck Benny" or usually just plain Buck.  The nickname was given to him by persons unknown based on a Jack Benny radio show where the phrase, "Jack Benny rides again." was part of the comic routine.  I understand the Benny part, being short for Bernard, but the Buck is a total mystery.

My Grandfather was a character with a capital "C".  He was tattooed over most of his upper body below the neck.  This was supposedly the result of a stint in the peace time Navy between the two World Wars.  He explained that all he and his shipmates did was get drunk on shore leave and get tattoos.  The drinking part would follow him back to civilian life and cause no end of problems for his family.  My Mother still tells bitter stories of his carousing at the local gin mill and her often having the humiliating task of bringing him home.  The family lived hand-to-mouth while Buck spent his paychecks buying rounds of drinks for all his friends.  The drinking ended when my parents were preparing to get married and Mom threatened to never speak to him again if he got drunk at the wedding.  He apparently never touched the bottle again.

My Grandparents on their wedding day.  Bernard Arendt and Clara Krygier

The man I knew was an adoring grandfather.  He was a sportsman; hunting and fishing were his hobbies.  He didn't shave.  He plucked his whiskers with tweezers, and grooming habit my brother and I watched with abject fascination.  He liked to watch the Friday night fights on TV, that is until a fighter died in the ring on national television.  He never watched the fights much after that.  He was a deaf as a doorknob, the result of his job as a drop forge hammer operator at a tool and die manufacturer.  Conversations with him were always carried on at shout level.  We'd be in the basement and he'd fart and tell us there was a polecat (skunk) hiding somewhere.  We'd drive over the metal roadway of a drawbridge and yell that we were taking off.  Anytime he saw a boat his immediate response was, "Yaja boat!".

My grandparents as I remember them best.

He once found an injured pigeon with a broken wing at work and brought it home and made it his pet.  He kept the bird mostly in the basement and it followed him around like a dog.  One day he took it outside and the neighbor's dog killed it.  My grandmother had to restrain him from shooting the dog.  After that he had a one-legged canary named "Rusty".  He seemed to have an affinity for hobbled birds.  His other hobby and greatest love was rose gardening.  The backyard of 89 Kelburn Street was totally given over to rose bushes.  One of my jobs was to go around and pull Japanese beetles off the bushes and drop them into a jar of gasoline.

100 Kelburn St.

As I have delved in the history of our family I have discovered the pieces of the puzzle of that side of my family.  Mateus Arendt came to America from Gdansk, Poland between 1880 and 1890.  He would marry Michalena Kubiak in 1899.  This was Mateus's second marriage, his previous wife dying in 1898.  They had one daughter, Helen.  Matthew (as he was known) and Minnie (as she was known) had 5 children: Edmond (Eddie), Leonard, Bernard, Florence and Felicia (Babe).  Minnie died in 1933 and Matthew in 1937.  My Grandfather and his family were living in his father's home at 100 Kelburn Street at that time.  His stepsister Helen evicted them from this house and stole the insurance settlement that was due my Grandfather.  The house would eventually go to his youngest sister Babe.  Aunt Helen was persona non grata in our family, akin to the Wicked Witch of the West.  Bennie was closest to his brother Eddie.  My grandparents and Eddie and his wife Helen spent a great deal of time together.

89 Kelburn St.

One time my brother and I were in the backyard at 89 Kelburn, which backed up to a large city park.  A shabbily dressed man came to the fence and called us over.  While we were talking to him my Grandmother ran out of the house and hustled us in admonishing us not to talk to "bums".  The bum turned out to be our Uncle Leonard.  Leonard had come home from World War II as damaged goods, "shell shocked" as they called it back then.  My Grandfather would give him money from time to time, but he was not welcome in the house when we were around and we were forbidden to talk to him.  I never saw him again after that day.  The other person in my Grandfather's family I was familiar with was "Auntie Babe", who lived next door to my Father's parents.  She doted over my brother and I and plied us with candy from a large cut glass jar in their living room.  Even after my family moved out of the city we spent many days back on Kelburn Street.

One habit my Grandfather never overcame was smoking.  He was a chain smoker and his brand was Kools.  It eventually killed him, despite his finally quitting and getting cancer treatments.  While he was dying he holed up in a bedroom in his house and refused to let my brother and I see him.  I caught a glimpse of him once near the end, a gaunt figure shrunken from the man who I adored.  I was 16 when we got the phone call that said he had passed.  My grandmother would eventually sell the house on Kelburn and move in to my room when I left for college in Chicago.

Welcome to Kaisertown

When I was thinking of a clever name for this blog I thought back to my distant past to the neighborhood in Buffalo where I lived for my first five years, and often visited afterwards to my Grandparent’s house.  Summer vacations days were spent there during my early elementary school years as both my parents worked.  My brother and I were commuter kids, dropped off by Mom in the morning and retrieved in the evening to return to the suburbs.  Kaisertown was, and still is, a working class neighborhood on Buffalo’s East side populated predominantly by people of the Polish persuasion.  That “Polishness”, rooted in staunch Catholicism and a love for Polka music, was the early foundation of my persona.

I was pretty much a free-range child, given to long wanderings to places I probably shouldn’t have gone.  I learned to love all the things an industrial neighborhood has to offer.  Kelburn Street, the home to the Arendts and Daruszkas who begat my parents, dead ended into the massive Worthington Pump Works.  I would walk to the top of the Bailey Avenue Bridge to watch the trains ply the rails that fed the city’s industries and carried its products to places I could never imagine.  This would feed a life-long fascination with all things railroad.

My parents were typical of their generation.  We lived with my Mom’s parents long enough for them to save enough to buy a house in the burbs.  My Dad was a World War II vet who never much talked about his experiences.  He wasn’t one of those go to the VFW Hall kind of guys who reminisced about the war over drinks.  My Mom was a sharp cookie.  She went to secretarial school and worked her whole life.  I always wondered about friends’ mothers who stayed at home.  My brother and I were latchkey kids during the school year, with defined duties that were essential to the smooth functioning of the household.  Chores first, play later.  My friends who weren’t burdened with these responsibilities would be out having a grand time long before I could join them.  I learned discipline and how to cook, things I would later find invaluable in adult life.  We were treated fairly and never wanted for much.  All in all it was a pretty idyllic childhood.

While my folks were pretty much straight arrows the same could not be said for my Grandfathers, who were strange in their own ways.  Both were reformed alcoholics and both put their respective families through endless hell until they sobered up for good.  Grandpa Daruszka was remote and sometimes scary.  Going to his house often felt like punishment.  Grandpa Arendt on the other hand was a fun guy capable of doing crazy stuff for the express entertainment of his grandsons.  Spending time at his house was something to always look forward to.  One lived at 89 Kelburn, the other at 98.  I rarely wanted to cross the street from heaven to hell.  Grandma Daruszka was my Father’s stepmother, his mother having died when he was 17.  Grandma Arendt was the chief cook and bottle washer at 89.  There was always something to eat on the table or in the fridge.  She always wanted people to eat, and eat we did.  I became a chubby little kid, something that would factor into my later role as target for the bully brigades.

I entered the world on November 1, 1950 at Millard Filmore Hospital.  And so, the story begins.