Greetings family and friends! Todays brief family vignette recalls a roadside lunch that my brother Jim and I can still remember after seven decades...and a little backstory of the product that can still be found in your local grocery store. Bill
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FATHER KNOWS BEST
Our small caravan pulled off the road onto a wide spot on the narrow two lane High Sierra highway. While we played in the remaining late winter patches of snow our dads collected a well used Coleman camp stove and it’s rickety stand from the bed of a pick-up truck along with a large pot and a stack of tin plates likely purchased at an Army/Navy Surplus store in Hayward. Meanwhile another dad retrieved several large cans of beef stew from his car and soon we were all enjoying a tasty hot meal under the ponderosa pines in the chill air.
The brand name of the classic canned stew had it’s roots in the newspaper comic strip “Bringing Up Father” created in 1913 by cartoonist George McManus. The daily strip followed the trials and tribulations of the New York Irish working class couple, Jiggs and Maggie who dealt with the unlikely “problem” of having won the Irish Sweepstakes. Longing for for the return to his previous simpler life, Jiggs often hung out at the neighborhood tavern owned by the popular Irish saloon keeper and great cook Dinty Moore. Convinced that he was the inspiration for McManus’s comic strip character, restaurateur James Moore took the name Dinty Moore for his popular midtown Manhattan Irish style restaurant that featured traditional corn beef and cabbage, and of course Irish stew. Meat packer Hormel bought the rights to the name in 1935 for it’s popular fifteen cent a can beef, carrot, potato and gravy product. Moore’s landmark Manhattan restaurant survived until the 1970’s while Dinty Moore Beef Stew is still readily available as are the memories of a father and son roadside lunch nearly 70 years ago. -Bill
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