My daughter's mother-in-law and I started exchanging emails when the kids made their engagement official. Because they are in Virginia and I am in Georgia, we parents had never met. We remember many of the same things and laugh at the same things.
Do you remember when there was no McDonald's, no Golden Arches? No Happy Meal?
I grew up in Macon, Georgia, a city/town with two older, established colleges. Our high schools and junior high schools were not coed. (We had separate schools for the girls and for the boys.)
I remember when the first McDonald's in Macon was built. I remember the special sauce, which I didn't really like. Onions weren't optional. I gained an appreciation for skinny fries.
The other MIL mentioned a three course meal for 47 cents at McDonald's. That I don't remember. Maybe it was a regional thing. I do remember enjoying the luxury of fast food, and I do mean luxury. Our family didn't see fast food as an automatic option. If we went shopping we ate before we left home or when we returned.
Remember drugstore food counters? Dime stores (5 & 10 Cent stores, or five & dime stores) like Woolworth's and H&L Green's offered soda fountains that made milkshakes one at a time and with real milk and ice cream. A few short order items might be offered, like grilled cheese sandwiches, hamburgers, or hot dogs cooked on a grill surface while you watched. Some offered canned chili or soup. Mama didn't offer those things at home.
Krystal has been around for a long time, but I only remember eating there when our family traveled from Macon to Meridian, Mississippi. I do remember that eating the tiny burgers was a sport, when we could afford more than one or two. My daddy asked a waitress what kind of mustard they used and we left with a container of it.
My daughter was born in Mexico, Missouri in 1972, where there were no fast food places. Her first word was "French fry" (fwi-fwi, but we knew what she mean) spoken at a McDonald's in Columbia, Missouri. Hey, it was a college town thirty miles away and they had a camera store.
Duluth, Georgia had four way stops and only one traffic light when we moved here in 1976 and no McDonald's.
Toni, remember Fincher's Drive-In?
What do you remember?
