Memory and Hot Dogs Answering to a ‘Higher Authority’

It’s been decades since Orthodox Jewish authorities have considered Hebrew National hotdogs appropriately kosher and, as a result, I haven’t had them in my house for at least the last 25 years.  A recent lawsuit – which was thrown out because the court said it couldn’t rule on religious matters – claimed that non-kosher meat was used to make the frankfurters. Those accusations went even farther than past concerns that some of the finer points of the kosher laws weren’t being followed by the manufacturers.

That’s unfortunate for two reasons. The first is that, at least in my memory, the all beef hotdogs were very tasty with a satisfying and juicy crunch when you bit into them. Secondly, the hotdogs played an important role in my childhood, being one of the most identifiable and readily available Jewish foods in the 1960s and 1970s. That the manufacturer answered to a “higher authority” was a point of pride, especially in my small Southern town where no one knew from bialys and kishka.

Hebrew National hotdogs were the centerpiece of many cookouts and parties when I was young. I especially liked them charred off the grill and then wrapped in a soft bun. That truly was the taste of summer for me.

Yet, I also strongly identify them with another event in my memory – in the nation’s collective memory. The association is so strong, in fact, that whenever I smell boiling hotdogs, I see a very specific and disturbing scene – Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.

Children like me were traumatized after Kennedy was shot; after all, it hadn’t been that long since we were instructed to “duck and cover” in case of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember walking home from school with my friends and scoping out the ditches along Fourth Street, strategizing what we would do if we saw a missile heading our way. At some level, we all feared President Kennedy’s death was the work of the Soviets and that we are heading into the third world war. Having a second murder occur before our eyes was almost too much to bear.

Like so many Americans of a certain age, I have vivid and very specific memories of the day Kennedy was shot and the days following. In my memory, there are a series of scenes, like a movie preview:

·         It’s early afternoon Nov. 22, 1963, and I’m sitting in a desk in the front row next to the window in my 4^th grade classroom at Orange Street Elementary School. I see my 3^rd grade teacher Mrs. Anderson tapping on the window; when I turn to look, she asks me to call my teacher Mrs. Nichols over. I overhear the two of the talking and realize what has occurred: Someone has shot President Kennedy. Mrs. Nichols turns on the television to watch Walter Cronkite announce that the president was dead.

·         I’m in the car with my mother a few hours later, and we are driving up to the high school to pick up my sisters. Linda is waiting out front and gets into the car, but we’re looking for our oldest sister Susan. After a minute, she comes out clutching her books and sobbing. When she gets in the car, she tells us that some of the other kids were cheering because Kennedy was dead and calling him a “N-----lover.”

·         My entire family is sitting in front of the television on Saturday – which never happens. My parents have closed their clothing store, and we are watching news coverage of the assassination. Kennedy’s body has been returned to Washington, and we see heartbreaking vignettes of his family.

·         Midday Sunday, we’re still so engrossed in the news that my mother decides we’ll eat hotdogs in the living room in front of the television set. I’m setting the old card table with paper plates and watching television. Suddenly, a man shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, who is being escorted by police. I scream, and my parents come running from the kitchen.

This was before children routinely saw violent acts such as close-range shootings. To the degree that anyone got killed in the movies and television shoes we watched, it was a bad guy in a black hat falling off of a horse never to be seen again or a similar bad guy clutching his chest and falling in a cartoonish shoot out death scene.

Furthermore, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby was horribly real. There was a loud shot and blood and chaos. I wanted to avert my eyes but couldn’t. It was even worse than the horrible scenes of civil rights protesters being beaten or chased by snarling dogs or the merciless beatings of protesters by the Chicago police, which I watched five years later.

When we heard the identity of the shooter, Jack Ruby, we were concerned and then had those worries confirmed: He was Jewish. It was uncomfortable to have one of our own kind in the spotlight for a violent act. To comfort ourselves, we said to each other, “Thank goodness, he killed the assassin, not the President.”

(My husband Marc tells me that his mother, who had immigrated to the United States less than 10 years before after hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust, was petrified from the moment she heard Kennedy was shot. She insisted they leave a doctor’s appointment and was convinced revolution would occur any moment. Marc, who was just 7-years-old, wasn’t all that aware of what was going on.)

As terrible as the Oswald shooting is in some ways, it also is poignant. How I wish I could have screamed and had my parents come running when I watched the plane hit the second tower on 9-11-2001. As an adult, I still crave that sense of safety, of everything being right with the world, that comes from having your own mother and father comfort you after seeing something disturbing, of having your sisters nearby and a warm meal on the table.

Strangely, I do have some recollection even after we watched the endless discussion and replay of the Lee Harvey Oswald shooting that afternoon. Eventually, we went to the kitchen, and my mother pulled the slightly-desiccated Hebrew National hotdogs out of the pot and put them in a bowl. One sister brought the massive can of Charles’ chips, with the other grabbing the buns. My father opened a jar of dill pickles, while I pulled out the mustard and ketchup and put them on the card table.

What else was there to do at that point?

Maybe it the end of our innocence, maybe it was the beginning of a downward spiral for a nation. The commentary on all of that was still years in the future.

We just did what families do to cope with crisis. We sat down together and ate a late lunch. It may have been simple, but it was one of the most memorable meals of my life.

Marcel Proust may have had his madeleines, but for me, this November 50 years later, remembrance is about Hebrew National hotdogs.