Hot Dogs and Red Hots

My father Henry was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1930 at the beginning of the Great Depression. Now, over three-quarters of a century later he has written a number of recollections of his childhood in America during the 1930s and 1940s. This is one of my favorites.

Hot Dogs and Red Hots
by Henry Speer

One of Tulsa’s two newspapers was the Tulsa World, which is still located on the East Side of Bolder Avenue between Third and Forth streets. The Coney Island Sandwich Shop was just next door. I remember when I was about five or six years old that we would sometimes get a bag of hot dogs for supper. I would drive down town with my dad in his ’33 Chevy to carry back the hot dogs in their brown paper bag.

Black people ran the Coney Island Sandwich Shop. Unfortunately, in those times, and in that place, always referred to as 'niggers'. Anyway, one of their specialties was hot dogs. These were the only hot dogs that I had experienced and I naturally assumed that all hot dogs were the same as these. They were really great hot dogs.

When you went into the shop there was a large grille right at the front looking out onto Bolder Street through the shop window. On the grille, neatly arranged in rows, were the wieners being grilled. Lined up with the wieners were the hot dog buns being toasted. On a side counter there was a large pot of chili and a huge bowl of chopped onions. You placed your order and one of the men behind the counter filled it. He put a grilled wiener into a toasted bun, spooned on a liberal amount of chili, and topped it off with chopped onions. Each hot dog was then wrapped in a sheet of thin, waterproof tissue paper. The entire order was neatly packed into a brown paper bag – all of this for a cost of only 5 cents each. So, for fifty cents we would get a bag of 10 hot dogs. This was a great supper for the four of us: mom, dad, sis, and I.

In the spring of 1945, when I was 14, we moved to San Francisco, California. World War Two was still going strong and, what with all of the service men about, San Francisco was a very lively place. Tulsa was the second largest city in Oklahoma and, in population, was close to the size of San Francisco. However, there was a world of difference between the two. Tulsa was a rather conservative place with a large fundamentalist religious population. San Francisco was a wide open, exciting city to a boy from Oklahoma.

One day I was in downtown San Francisco wandering about and taking in the sights. There were several movie theaters along Market Street and I was deciding which movie I wanted to see. I happened to wander past one of the many open front street shops and saw a sign with a picture of a wiener in a hot dog bun. It had a caption in big red letters saying "RED HOTS - 25 cents".

Well, I thought that was rather a lot to pay for a hot dog but perhaps that was the going rate in San Francisco. I was hungry and didn’t want to sit through a movie with only a bag of popcorn to satisfy me. So I stepped up to the counter and ordered a red hot. I handed the man my 25 cents and he flipped open the top of a steam cabinet and pulled out a hot dog bun. Then he lifted the lid of a big kettle of boiling water and fished out a wiener. He slapped the soggy wiener between the soggy bun and handed it to me.

I took it from him and asked, “Where’s the chili and onions?”

Of course, I had a strong Oklahoma twang and he looked at me with a scowl on his face, probably thinking 'Stupid Okie'.

“What chili? We don’t got no chili kid. There’s mustard and ketchup over there.” he said, pointing to a side counter. I dabbed a little mustard on the soggy affair and walked out onto Market Street.

That was my introduction to a San Francisco hot dog, ugh. Twenty five cents would have bought me five really good, proper, hot dogs in Tulsa!

Many, many years later chili dogs, as they were called, became a popular item with hot dog venders in San Francisco and New York. But I remember that in Tulsa, in the 1930’s at the Coney Island Sandwich Shop on Bolder Street we were eating proper chili dogs, and for only a nickel.