The Hard Way on Purpose (10 page)

CUTTING THE MUSTARD

So I'm standing around one day, talking to a friend from out of state, and I casually mention that Akron is the birthplace of the hamburger, and he stops cold and gives me one of those cartoon, you're-out-of-your-gourd looks.

“The birthplace of the hamburger?” he says. “That's like saying corn was invented in Nebraska.”

But of course Akron is the home of the hamburger. Just as it is the Rubber Capital of the World, Blimp City, and the Sports Capital of the World—all nicknames the city has adopted at one time or another, all in the realm of the superlative. This is important, an odd matter of psychological balance.

To celebrate this heady claim and to explore both its capacity and that of my colon, I decided by the end of that conversation that I would embark on a spiritual journey. I would spend one solid week eating nothing but my city's famous hamburgers.

No vegetables, save for some wrinkled pickle slices and greasy mushrooms. No fruit, except, in a moment of weakness, a slice of apple pie at an old workingman's diner. I gulped down a couple gallons of root beer and ate enough french fries to stabilize ­Idaho's economy.

I ate wide burgers and tall burgers and square burgers and sliders. I ate carhop burgers as if I were a member of Sha Na Na. I tried to eat a burger at one of those ritzy blue-hair steak houses that people like me only go to on prom dates, but they wouldn't serve me one.

After a while, it all started to become a tangled puzzle. If the Ido Bar & Grill serves the Famous Ido Burger, what to make of Bob's Hamburg's claim Famous Since 1931, and the Main Street Saloon's Famous Jumbo Burger?

In a celebrity age, when everyone with a Twitter following has a kind of virtual renown, what does “famous” even mean?

Where is the truth?

I began on a Monday. Recognizing that the high-concept purposeful consumption of a single food category has become something of a journalistic subgenre, I followed the example of my forebears, stopping for a visit with a nurse to chart my baseline vitals. One hundred fifty and three-quarter pounds of red-blooded American carnivore. My blood pressure was normal, 112 over 74. Although all that beef was likely to affect my cholesterol level, she said it wouldn't show up for months, so we didn't bother measuring for that. Besides, I didn't want to know.

And so I was off.

For seven days, I would be asked the same philosophical question over and over: “Want fries with that?”

Damn straight I do.

*  *  *

My quest began at Menches Bros., a restaurant owned by a family that clings proudly to its claim that its ancestors invented the hamburger. (And the ice-cream cone and Cracker Jack. But that's another story.)

As the legend goes, Frank and Charles Menches, wealthy businessmen from Akron, happened along their invention by accident. They were making their living as fair vendors, hauling a tent around on a train car and selling food. One day in 1885 (or 1892, depending on the iteration of the story), while working the local county fair (or, in some iterations, a fair in New York), they ran short of sausages. They called on a local meat vendor, who told them he had no sausage links, only ground sausage.

“We've got to have sandwich meat,” Frank Menches recalled in a 1938 newspaper interview. “Send over that tub of ground sausage!”

The industrious brothers formed the sausage into patties, fried it up, and the sandwiches sold like, uh, hotcakes. So the next day, when it came time to buy their meat, they decided to save a little money and make beef sandwiches—the butcher was charging 4¢ a pound more for sausage.

Frank Menches said he told the butcher to run some beef through the grinder. It came out “just dandy,” he said, and he and his brother sold about a thousand pounds of beef patties each day of the fair. They didn't have a name yet, so they just hollered, “Get your hot sandwiches here!”

Two years later, according to the story, they discovered another vendor at an Ohio fair selling the same ground-beef sandwiches, calling them hamburgers. They adopted the name, and “everybody's called 'em hamburgers ever since,” Frank said.

Fast-forward to 1991, the Menches family reunion. Some of the adults got to talking and decided to sell some old-style Menches burgers at the county fair later that summer. They were a hit, and in 1994, five of Charles Menches's great-grandchildren got together and opened Menches Bros. restaurant.

Judy Menches-Kusmits has become the family historian, carefully pulling together evidence to strengthen the family's claim as the unmoved mover of the hamburger. There are some problems with that, chiefly that the 1938 newspaper story says the invention happened in 1892.

Menches-Kusmits insists it was 1885. The source she uses to back up the family's claim, a book called
Tanbark and Tinsel
, differs from the newspaper story in a number of details. There, the author, who also relies on an interview with Frank Menches, writes that the sandwich was concocted at New York's Erie County Fair, held in the city of Hamburg.

The 1885 date is important because of a place called Seymour, Wisconsin, the self-proclaimed Home of the Hamburger.

*  *  *

Every year at the beginning of August, Seymour celebrates its Burger Fest. They have a parade with hamburger floats. They have a hamburger-stacking contest. They have a Hamburger King and Queen. They have a rather disturbing-sounding event that involves small children sliding in ketchup.

They take their hamburgers seriously up there in Seymour.

In 1988, the town of three thousand barbecued its way into the
Guinness Book of World Records
with a 5,525-pound hamburger. It was twenty-one feet across—the size of a two-car garage, as they proudly note. Thirteen thousand people ate from it, and there was still enough left to donate to a food bank.

Their festival celebrates the legacy of a man named Charlie Nagreen—the founder of the hamburger.

Vivian Treml, president of Home of the Hamburger, the group that runs the Burger Fest and the local Hamburger Hall of Fame, told me the story: It was 1885. Hamburger Charlie, as he has come to be known, was a fifteen-year-old fair vendor, hauling around a load of meatballs in a wagon pulled by a team of oxen. The meatballs weren't going over too well with fairgoers looking for finger food, so he flattened them, slapped them between two pieces of bread, and called them hamburgers. They sold like, uh, hotcakes. Yes, I thought the story sounded familiar, too. But it seems unfair (and perhaps unwise) to suggest the notion of myth to a town whose pride hinges on a two-and-a-half-ton hamburger.

Our two towns are not alone. Hamburg, New York; Athens, Texas; and New Haven, Connecticut, also claim to be the birthplace of the American hamburger.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
says the real origin of the sandwich is unknown, but it was probably brought to the United States by nineteenth-century German immigrants, whose chopped-beef sandwich was named for the city of Hamburg.

As I sat in Menches Bros. talking to Judy Menches-Kusmits, she showed me some books about the history of hamburgers. Those that deal with the dueling claimants don't state definitively who gets credit for the invention, but the Menches family is sticking to its guns. So is Seymour.

We talked awhile. I told Judy I was planning to eat nothing but hamburgers for a week.

This woman, to whom the hamburger is as important as her own family, looked me dead in the eye and said, “You're not really going to do that.”

Yes, Judy, I am.

*  *  *

Did you ever notice how, when you stare at a hamburger, it looks as if it were smiling at you? Okay, maybe that's just me. But it's such a friendly American icon. The round-topped sandwich with the slice of beef peeking out is so familiar. It's the Wilford Brimley of sandwiches.

I love those big plastic guys that stand outside Big Boy, holding the big plastic hamburger on the big plastic tray. I remember the news stories a while back when one got stolen from the front of a restaurant in suburban Ohio, how the manager said plaintively, “We miss the big fella.”

I tried to explain some of this to my four-year-old son as we sat waiting for our hamburgers at a carhop place in Akron. I pointed to the Soap Box Derby track right across the road, told him how kids raised on hamburgers race homemade cars down that hill. I pointed over to the Rubber Bowl, the University of Akron's football field, and told him John Heisman used to coach there, and now his name is on the trophy given to the best college football player in America. I pointed over to the giant old Goodyear Airdock, told him how zeppelins used to fly out of there, how
Ripley's Believe It or Not
called it one of the wonders of the world.

I told him we live in an important place. I think I even said “mythical.”

I could smell the hamburgers cooking inside the little kitchen and was moved to ask the question that is not really a question:

“Did you know the hamburger was invented in Akron?”

He looked me straight in the eye and responded with the four-year-old's version of “That's like saying corn was invented in Nebraska.”

*  *  *

Bob's Hamburg is a shrine to the great American sandwich, a cramped, old-style diner with red vinyl stools at the Formica counter and Patsy Cline on the jukebox. A tiny nook in the corner is called the Bahama Room. It can seat six, if they like each other a lot.

A McDonald's opened across the street from Bob's in the 1960s, a seeming death knell to the little mom-and-pop. The McDonald's went out of business in 1997. Bob's did not.

A man and a woman were discussing their bowling scores in the next booth as the waitress asked me what I wanted.

“Hamburger,” I said.

Barb Schlagenhauser, the owner, stopped by after a while. My hamburger was smiling at me as Barb told me a little about the history of the place. As the sign declares, it has been famous since 1931, when Bob Holbrook first opened the doors. But most people know it as the domain of a man named Walt Ridge, who owned it from 1934 until his death in 1981.

“He had a heart attack there in the Bahama Room,” Barb said wistfully.

She introduced me to another customer, an old regular who'd come this day to celebrate his seventy-sixth birthday. He has been a regular here for most of his life, he said, grew up around the corner.

“People say, ‘Where you goin' to lunch?'” he said, then offered his answer as though they'd asked the color of the sky: “Bob's.”

Barb sells a couple hundred hamburgers a day. That's what she does—she watches people eat hamburgers.

But when I told her about my special diet, she made a bad face and said, “Oh,
Gawd
!”

*  *  *

The valet approaches. A valet is kind of like a carhop, except a carhop brings you food and a valet takes your car.

I am wearing a tie and a linen suit, practicing in my head exactly how I am going to order a hamburger in the only restaurant in Akron I could think of where it would seem ridiculous to order a hamburger.

I try it with an English accent. “I'd like an om-burga, my good man.” Maybe?

The lighting is dim, the music sublime. The waiters are in tuxedos. People are drinking martinis from wide glasses and eating expensive steaks and influencing Republican politics. The grill chef works behind a brick half-wall in the dining room. I shoot a glance in his direction as the maître d' ushers my wife and me through the dining room. I don't see any ground beef, anywhere.

We start with an appetizer of oysters Rockefeller, a canny tactic to throw the waiter off the scent. Nice people out for a classy dinner, he must be thinking. I like the cut of their jib. Nice tie on that guy, too.

I consider my order again. Righteous indignation? Maybe that's it.
What do you mean there are no hamburgers on the menu? What kind of place is this?

The waiter approaches. My wife orders filet and scampi.

He turns to me. “And for the gentleman?”

“I'd like a hamburger,” I say, my Akron twang hanging out like a street cleaner's shirttail.

He appears more than slightly concerned. “I don't think we can do that,” he says drily.

“Couldn't the chef just chop up a filet?” I say, making the international meat-cleaver motion with my hand.

“I can ask,” he says, his forehead creasing.

The waiter leaves, huddles with a few others over by the grill chef.

He returns. “I'm sorry. We can't make you a hamburger. And”—pausing for effect, leaning in closer—“that's straight from the owner.”

I try to look disappointed, but I realize that, at this very moment, I am being given a reprieve—straight from the owner!—from my carnal incarceration. I want to rip the menu from his hands and scan it for the diametrical opposite of a hamburger. I want vegetables! I want fresh fruit! I want poached fish! Pasta! Soup!

I order a steak.

*  *  *

I decided to end this thing in the American way, with a Sunday-evening barbecue. Me, fire, cow meat.

I stared at the glowing embers in my grill.

We all need to be somebody, I thought. That's why every humble place in America has one of those signs at the city limits that says
WELCOME TO (YOUR MUNICIPALITY HERE), HOME OF (CLAIM TO FAME HERE).

I understand Seymour, with its garage-size hamburger, wanting to cling to its pride. But, Seymour, you've got to understand. We were somebody once. We were a lot of things. We kind of need something to remain our own.

One by one, I dropped the patties onto the grill. In a short time, I will have eaten my last hamburger. I will find, at my weigh-in the next day, that I have gained only one pound and my blood pressure has barely budged. I will find that I have survived, future cholesterol results be damned. I will remember every hamburger fondly, the nights we shared, their smiling faces.

I will say, Thank you, Akron. Thank you for the hamburgers.