I grew up in small town in the coal regions of northeast Pennsylvania. It's called Tamaqua, which, as I may have mentioned here before, is an Indian word that translates to either "land of running water" (the Schuykill River, which runs into the Delaware River in Philadelphia, starts nearby) or "land of plentiful beaver." Naturally, when you reach the teenage years, you prefer the latter translation. Or not. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Long before my time, Tamaqua was a bustling little town. The trains went through it every day. We had 2 movie theaters (the Victoria and the Majestic), 2 five-and-dimes (Newberry's and Woolworth's), our own home-grown department store (Scheid's), numerous banks, restaurants, gas stations, etc. When I was very little, we still had most of the above, but through the 60s and into the 70s, the town started to die a little, and many businesses, including my grandfather's print and stationery shop, suffered. The train system fell apart and the trains stopped coming. Along the spur line that ran behind my grandparent's house on Rowe Street (which eventually became our house in my high school years), the tracks were torn up. Nothing replaced them. They just took the ties and rails out. People parked back there but it wasn't like they made it into a new street or anything. It was just...there.
Along that spur line, in the center of downtown, was a little hole in the wall lunch counter called the Texas Lunch. It was started by a Greek immigrant named Pete (I'm not going to mention any last names here, to protect the guilty), who, when I was a kid, was well into his advanced years. His son, Dino, also ran it. Dino lived across the street from my grandparents, and his older daughter was my age and in my class at school.
Now Pete was a bit loony and did some things that would probably get him arrested today. He chased kids. I don't think it was any more than anger. Kids can be cruel, and when they'd see this little old man shuffle along, they'd start yelling, "CRAZY PETE! CRAZY PETE! CRAZY PETE!" I can still hear it in my head, the cadence of it, the noise and escalation of it, the peer pressure involved. He'd ignore it for a short time, then he'd get angry and start yelling, and finally he would just about burst into flames. He would scream and yell and curse--MAN! Could he curse!--and chase the kids, flailing his cane the entire time. Now mind you, this is a guy in his 70s, at least, at the time. I remember once he had a kid cornered downtown and it took an adult to come over and calm him down and get him away. I never saw him actually grab a child or hit anyone, but he got so agitated and wound up...it was a very scary sight.
But the Texas Lunch was an institution. It was literally a hole in the wall at the end of a building. I remember it being roughly triangular in shape, and had a small counter with about 3-4 stools and that was it. Behind the counter was the grill and all they served was hamburgers and hot dogs, if I remember correctly. It was there that I experienced my first chili dog and it was heavenly. My dad or my brother would sometimes bring home a bag full of them, a bag filled with an incredible smell, steam coming off of it in the winter. The place was always packed, even though hygiene was not a particular concern. My father loved telling the tail of being in there late one night when Pete was still lucid enough to cook (they didn't call him Crazy Pete for nuthin', you know) and one of my dad's bowling buddies, said, "Hey, Pete! There's a roach!" And Pete, not missing a beat from turning burgers on the grill, took his burger-turning spatula, whacked the offending bug into an early grave and went back to flipping burgers with the SAME instrument.
Eventually, someone bought the building and tore it down to make a room for a bank with one of those new-fangled "drive-thru" thingies. Pete died, Dino went and worked as a toll collector on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Texas Lunch faded--almost--from memory. I still remember that smell of a bag of burgers brought in on a cold winter night, the fried onions, the tangy meat, always peppered beyond my taste, but still delicious. Health code stickers didn't exist, and if they did, the Texas Lunch would have died long before the bank came a'callin'. Maybe those roaches were the extra seasoning...
Facinating story and so similar to my Texas Lunch hot dog eatery. Not far from you in Port Jervis, NY we had a Texas Lunch that I remember came to our town about the early 1960's. Ran by an old Greek fellow and had, besides dogs, hamburgers, pie, coffee & soda. The way the dogs where made with the slab of mustard then lots of finely diced onions and slopped with the tangy but not heavily meaty sause. The sauce was thick enough to cling to the onions and run through a bit to get on your fingers. It was always a wonder to behold the owner getting 6 or more steamed buns up his arm on a cloth and then assembling them in a row as he held them on his arm then plopped them on plates.
The original place is gone but Texas Lunch is still in PJ several blocks down in a brick building. I have managed to duplicate a similar sauce and put them together as he did. Hard to find a treat like those around here in western Oregon.
Posted by: Steve Langer | 02/14/2006 at 03:15 PM