Thus, my living room was deprived of the ESPN telecast of Nathan's Hot Dog eating contest being viewed by an array of the invited. I for one was disappointed in the lack of household viewers when I watched the contest on Monday.
They were deprived of my reminiscences of this July 4th being the 50th anniversary of when I started at Steve's Lunch, a food stand inside the subway area, before the turnstiles, at the BMT Coney Island station at Surf and Stillwell Avenues, diagonally opposite the famous Nathan's across the street.
Nathan's was famous 50 years ago, but there was no eating extravaganza like there is today. I worked that summer at Steve's Lunch for probably 8 weeks, in between my high school graduation and starting college. I think I got $1.50 an hour, my hours accurately recorded by Mrs. Steve. I don't remember her name, or their last name, but they were Greeks.
I was an exemplary employee. Never late, never complaining, and didn't eat my way through the goods, although I did like whatever brand of hot dogs Steve was pushing there. I also liked the chunky cut French fries we provided that were made from fresh potatoes and peeled by some machine that I was fascinated with. Did the Army have potatoe-peeling machines to replace the drudgery the soldiers were assigned to when they were put on K.P duty?
K.P. stands for Kitchen Police, and it was not a looked-forward-to assignment in the Army. I remember my father telling me that a day of K.P., from the very early morning to the evening meal was pure drudgery. Demoralizing. All those potatoes to peel, and all those pots to clean. Huge pots. He told me guys would gladly pay other soldiers to take over their K.P. assignments for the day.
The proprietor of Steve's Lunch was Steve, a short, silver-haired Greek who was constantly worried about money. In short, a typical Greek food vendor. We did business as people went past us to and from the beach at Coney Island. We offered cold, wet bottles of soda that were dug out from the red, block ice-filled Coca-Cola cooler, hot dogs, French fries and knishes. To this day, I hate knishes.
The food stand had two sides, and I "manned" one of the sides. Occasionally Steve drifted over to see how I was doing. If there were no customers at the moment he would glare over at the ever-busy Nathan's and tell me to start shouting that we had hot dogs, "come and get your hot dogs."
Even at that callow age I could give someone a withering stare. I said nothing, but thought plenty. Are you nuts, little guy? My shouting into empty air, at no one, is going to draw people to your hot dogs? Steal customers from Nathan's? I remained silent, and eventually Steve went back to the other side with his wife and probably lamented he hadn't been born Jewish.
So every time the ESPN cameras put the entrance to the subway into view I reminisced. I haven't been back there in all these years, but it looked like the letters BMT were still visible on the subway's brick facade, standing for Brooklyn Manhattan Transit, one of the three predecessor subway companies that eventually became NYC Transit and the MTA.
The ESPN telecast and the contest is pure American hucksterism. The longtime M.C. George Shea, in his blue blazer and striped boater is pure professor Harold Hill from the musical 'The Music Man.' My guess is he's been written about colorfully in the past, but I was disappointed in today's NYT story on the contest.
The writer concentrated on the women's division, held separately before the main event, the men. It is a pity the words and hype spewed out from George were not given more play in the story. Every contestant that was introduced got a bit of a personalized introduction. One of the male contestants is a physics professor with a Ph.D. One black guy gyrated and busted loose as Mr. Shea introduced him with an incredible soliloquy of rap that had me wondering how is this guy Shea remembering all this? Another got an equal tongue-twisting introduction that had Mr. Shea pausing first to gather his thoughts and breath before launching into a Gilbert and Sullivan-like discourse.
But the best was last, after Joey Chestnut crushed the young man who beat him last year, Matt Stonie. As the digital clock recorded the time left and the consumed count, it was obvious to anyone who had any handle on math that Mr. Chestnut was going to coast to a Secretariat-length victory over his opponents.
Chick Anderson famously said of the horse in his call of that Triple Crown-earning Belmont race, "he's moving like a tremendous machine." George Shea in his greatest end-of-world-preacher-thunder voice after Joey's victory, intoned that Mr. Chestnut, "has God's user name and his password."
As for myself, I still like hot dogs. But I like Karl Ehmer hot dogs.
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