Ah, baloney

Until I was in 7th grade, I went home from school for lunch. Most kids did. The handful of kids who lived to far to leg it home, or whose mothers worked (the horror!), brought their lunch to school. But most of us went home, where lunch at the Rogers house was generally a bit of Campbell's (or Lipton) soup and a sandwich. And - of course - a glass of milk, which - at the direction of local kiddie show "star" Big Brother Bob Emery -  we used to toast the President of the United States. (We ate our lunch at the kitchen table, but then got to watch a few minutes of Big Brother before tearing back down the hill to school.)

My parochial school was grades 1-8, but many kids who went to public school (i.e., "pubs") went to K-6 schools, followed by junior high. In order to keep us from exhibiting any "pub envy", longing to be cool junior high kids, and to prep us for the rigors of high school, Our Lady of the Angels instituted a sort of fake junior high experience for us.

We would periodically shift classrooms with the 8th graders, so we'd have one nun for religion and then pick up our books and walk next door for math. Then back to our original class for history. Then back next door for geography.

The system worked well enough until the 7th grade nun took ill (learned later: nervous breakdown) and they doubled us up with the 8th grade. Nearly 100 kids, two to a desk, crammed into a single classroom. This went on for a couple of months until they found a substitute nun. Then we were back to fake junior high. 

Anyway, during fake junior high, we brought our lunch to school and ate at our desks (which were covered with a small sheet of plastic, the same one we used to protect our desks on Friday, when we had our water color painting class).

Our school had a cafeteria of sorts in the auditorium, with long tables that folded out of the walls. For some reason, we weren't allowed to eat in there. 

The best aspect of our fake junior high was that we got out at 2 p.m., rather than 3 p.m. And bringing lunch to school was a close runner up. Much cooler than rushing home for lunch with Mom; much closer to what the kids we watched on TV (c.f., Beaver Cleaver) did.

Except that no one carried a lunch box. We were too grown up and sophisticated for that. We brought our lunch in brown paper bags, and washed lunch down with the half pint of milk we all paid a dime a week for.

To raise money for the missions, you could buy a nickel bag of Wachusett potato chips or a candy bar. Whenever I had five cents to spare, I got a bag of chips or a packet of Kraft caramels. My friend Kathy Shea was responsible for sales. 

What was in my paper bag lunch?

On Friday - no meat day - it was PBJ. But Monday through Thursday, it was a baloney sandwich on white bread, "dressed" with a sliced kosher dill pickle, wrapped separately in Saran Wrap to keep the sandwich from getting soggy.

Once in a while, I swapped the Friday PBJ for American cheese and dill pickle. But Monday through Thursday, it was baloney all the way. Sometimes on Saturdays, I'd have fried baloney for lunch. 

And my baloney had a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R. My baloney had a last name, it's M-A-Y-E-R. 

I like to eat it everyday. 

And if you'd ask me why, I'd say,

That Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A

Which was how fancy people spelled baloney. 

For Sunday suppers, my family had cold cut sandwiches - with cold cuts (ham, pepper loaf, salami) from Maury's Delicatessen - but are work-week cold cut of choice was Oscar Mayer baloney. We were also an Oscar Mayer house when it came to bacon, hot dogs, and liverwurst, which only my mother liked. 

Once in a while - very once in a while - I have an Italian cold cut sub. But, other than on Christmas Eve when I put our cold cuts (good cold cuts: pricey ham, pricey roast beef, pricey turkey), I'm not much of a cold cut kind of gal. 

Still, although the thought of actually eating baloney pretty much makes me gag, memories of my Oscar Mayer baloney days are generally fond. And I still get a kick out of spotting the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile trucking down the highway.

But I don't actually buy any Oscar Mayer products.

So I sure wasn't going to race out to buy Oscar Mayer Bologna Meat Seltzer. Hard seltzer because, of course, you'd have to be hell bent on getting a buzz on in order to down a can of meat seltzer. 

Just the other day, Pink Slip was gag-reflexing at the thought of crab-infused whiskey. But this brew just takes the cake.

My stomach is roiling.

Fortunately, Oscar Mayer hasn't lost its meaty mind, and there's no such thing as meat hard seltzers from them. (At least not yet.) Unfortunately, there is a brewery in Texas that's brought out a hot dog flavored hard seltzer called Bun Length. 

Roil on, oh stomach of mine. Granddaughter of a German butcher from Chicago here - who knows, Jake Wolf may even have rubbed shoulders with one of the Oscar Mayers; they were on different planes, financially, but Jake had a successful meat market, and he and the Mayers were contemporaries on the Chicago German butcher scene - and I really can't bear to think about this product, even if it's fake. (Makes me want to drop into my Irish grandfather's bar and gulp down a whiskey neat. Too bad Rogers Brothers Saloon went out with Prohibition.)

As for Oscar Mayer hard seltzer, I'm glad it doesn't exist. Talk about a hard pass.

Achtung, baby! I'll stick with Polar Raspberry Lime non-hard seltzer.(My seltzer has a first name, it's P-O-L-A-R...)