Baby Boomers: The Strangest Generation

Supper’s Ready: Family dinner in the 70s

• John Ward

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Speaker 1:

Hello, it's me, john Ward. This one is called Supper's Ready Dinner Time in the 1970s and I hope some of you get the reference Supper's Ready. Remember Genesis. They were a rock band before they were a pop band. I think it was a whole album called Supper's Ready. They did a whole record about eating supper that I didn't really understand much about what they were talking about, but it was good music.

Speaker 1:

But people used to eat dinner together as a family. In the 60s, 50s, 1970s, maybe into the 80s, mother, father, kids would gather around the dinner table every night and eat dinner. And I'm not saying that we need to do that anymore. Saying that we need to do that anymore, I'm not saying that it was some kind of bonding family event because in many ways it was torturous, it was tough, but we don't do it anymore and I'm not blaming it on social media. It was dead and gone long before computers and I'm not going to interview a Harvard sociologist or look up the latest studies or anything like that about generations that ate dinner with their family versus those that didn't. I get some critiques that I don't have a lot of substance to my podcast and I don't a lot of substance to my podcast and I don't, it's just me talking.

Speaker 1:

We used to eat dinner together as a family and somebody should chronicle it, somebody should just mention it, somebody should remember it. So that's all. This is Me remembering what it used to be like and remembering what it used to be like and how important it used to be. And it was important. Let me tell you, dinner time was sacred. It was so sacred that we started every meal with a prayer Father Son, holy Spirit, bless our Lord, and these are gifts from which we are about to receive, from thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord. Amen, in the name of the Father, son, holy Spirit. We had to say that at every meal, as fast as we could, so we could eat. But you know, when you've got to start something off with a prayer, that it's pretty important. It was so important that if the phone rang during dinner time, whoever dared to call anybody during the hours that existed that somebody might possibly be eating dinner with their family would get cussed out for even thinking about calling, and everybody knew not to do it. Nobody could come to your door during dinnertime. The TV was off. It was a time when families came together and ate, and I don't want to overly make this a nostalgic memory trip down memory lane, because I'm not really that sad that dinner time is gone. It wasn't really that wonderful. Just the fact that we got to eat was pretty good. That wonderful Just the fact that we got to eat was pretty good. But it was sacred. It was every night and it was a whole ritual.

Speaker 1:

Now, where I grew up in my neighborhood, everybody pretty much did the same thing. Every family was a blue-collar working-class family and our dads all worked at the same place or similar places. They made steel or they made cars or they worked construction steel or they made cars or they worked construction. And when you were a kid you'd get home from school and you'd get pretty much just kicked out of the house and told to go out and play and then when the dads would start coming home and they all worked the same shifts so they would all pull into the neighborhood at the same time and the front doors would open and the moms would call and everybody had to go eat because Dad was home. But you know, dad was home from making friggin' steel, right, dad was home from working a construction site. Dad was. He could have maybe used a couple of cocktails and a beer before he had to sit down with the whole family and it didn't make for the most relaxing, fine dining that you might think it was, where families commune and talk about their day and stuff like that. It really wasn't like that. That's why I don't really mourn its passing.

Speaker 1:

But dinner time started way before dinner time. Dinner time started with payday. My dad would get paid. Honestly, he got paid once a month. He worked steel. He got paid once a month and him and my mom would sit down and they would. He would cash his check and they would bring the cash home and they would put it in envelopes and budget so much for gas, so much for mortgage, so much for electricity, so much for food, so much for electricity, so much for food, and so by the end of every month, you know, we were kind of running low on stuff. So then payday led to grocery day and grocery day was the best Because my mom would go shopping and she would walk in with all these treasures, all this food, and we were getting with all these treasures, all this food, and we were getting.

Speaker 1:

Look, I wasn't poor or anything like that. You know, don't get me wrong. I didn't suffer at all. I had a great childhood. But you know, when that food came in the house it was a big deal and we would. It would be like Christmas morning, and I grew up with three sisters and myself, so there was a little bit of competition for the food. In fact, I would often get up the day after grocery shopping really early and go find what I want in the kitchen and hide it. I know that my sisters did too. I don't want to bring them into it, but there was a competition for food, man, because we had a lot of kids and food went quick and so we've got the money, we got the groceries, we got the family.

Speaker 1:

So let me take you into a circa 1975 kitchen in middle America. You didn't really have a dining room Some people did, but we ate in the America. You didn't really have a dining room Some people did, but we ate in the kitchen. We had a kitchen table and there was no dishwasher. Poor us right? No dishwasher. I got a dishwasher now it doesn't even work. I do everything by hand. And my dad bought the food, my mother made the food and the kids cleaned up after the meal. It was a division of labor. It was a system, a melody, a process, a ballet mother, father, children. So that part of it was kind of sweet that everybody contributed. And we had a stove in the kitchen.

Speaker 1:

Now, I don't know if you guys remember what stoves used to be like, but they were death traps. They were treacherous. Any kid that had to light a stove adult, anybody, kids would have to do this. First of all, the burners on top. They didn't click or anything. All you did is you'd turn the knob and immediately gas would start shooting out natural gas and it stunk and you'd have to have matches somewhere. You'd have to hit the match first, then turn the burner knob and put the match next to the burner so that the burner would light up. Okay, no big deal. It's not like we're living in medieval times or anything like that, but it was a little bit dangerous.

Speaker 1:

But the real problem was the oven. So the oven you would open the door, you'd bring it down, open from the top and pull it down towards the floor and there would be a little hole in the front and then you'd turn the oven on and the gas would start flowing directly through the oven into the oven, filling the oven and you'd have to light the match and start the oven and you know, if you got distracted or you dropped the match and that oven filled up with gas and then you hit that match, bam boom, your frigging eyebrows would be missing. You know, it was kind of dangerous and thank God they got rid of those things. They were bad, all right. So we got the stove, the food, the groceries, we got our family.

Speaker 1:

What about the menu? What did we used to eat? Well, I'll tell you what we used to eat really bad food. Half the shit we ate was processed crap. Now, I grew up in an Irish neighborhood. Irish-man stuff we didn't cook. You know, I'm sure other ethnicities were really making good food and stuff, but it was just our way. You know, food wasn't our genre, it wasn't our thing. We were more into beer and things like that.

Speaker 1:

I remember my mother, my sweet mother, who I love so much, who's such a wonderful woman. She would make. She'd take a piece of Wonder Bread. She would cut a fat slab of Velveeta cheese, put it on the Wonder Bread, hit the Wonder Bread with a bunch of Hunt's ketchup over the cheese, cut two pepperonis, put them on top of the ketchup, on top of the Velveeta and then sprinkle it with oregano and then pop it in the broiler, in the oven for about four minutes, and we call that pizza. And it was good, man, I'm telling you, I still eat it. I'll probably have one tomorrow, not with the though, but try it now. I'm giving out menus or recipes. I remember we ate that pizza for years like that, thinking it was pizza.

Speaker 1:

And then a Italian guy opened up a pizzeria at the corner of our street and, as just a kid and I went down there and I said to the guy. I said look at you, know, can I get a job? You got something for me to do? And he said well, I'll tell you what. You sweep my parking lot and I'll give you a pizza. So I go home.

Speaker 1:

I said Ma, don't bother cooking tonight. I'm maybe 12, 13. I said I got dinner tonight. I'm going to bring home a pizza. She's like a pizza, what are you talking about? I said don't worry about it, just wait, I'm going to take care of dinner tonight. I go sweep the parking lot. Guy goes how many kids you got? I go four kids, two adults, five dogs. We had like five dogs. I don't know why my mother loved dogs. She still does. And he says, okay, I'm going to give you a large and a small, that should do it. I'm like no shit man. I look at this pizza. I'm like not on a meat, look at that thing, that's a pizza. I get that pizza. I walk on home to my house, everybody's waiting for me. Johnny's bringing home dinner tonight. Right, I take that pizza, I put it on the table, I open the box and I say this is pizza, this is real pizza. And we ate that pizza. Then we ate that pizza forever. We found out what real pizza was, but I'll still eat that fake pizza, that fake Wonder Bread pizza. Our spaghetti was Mueller's macaroni and ragu. Still love it, but it wasn't real spaghetti. You know real Italian spaghetti.

Speaker 1:

We were Catholic and we had to during Lent. Most Catholics eat fish on Fridays during Lent, but we were so friggin' Catholic every Friday we had to eat fish. Oh, I can't eat fish to this day. And my mom God bless her soul, I love her so much. My mom wasn't really that good at cooking fish. So she would get these Mrs Paul's fish sticks, and we would. It's. All we would eat would be Mrs Paul's fish sticks mashed potatoes with every meal and milk, and I grew so sick I thought that was what fish was right. I couldn't eat it because I had years of every Friday night eating fish.

Speaker 1:

We had a lot of stews. We had a lot of sloppy joes. We had a lot of stews. We had a lot of sloppy joes. We had a lot of grilled cheese. We had shitty food in the 70s. Let's be honest, man, we had shitty food.

Speaker 1:

But the one thing you couldn't do, no matter what, you had to eat everything on your plate. Now, if my mom made some goulash or some stew or something like that, I had to eat it, no matter how bad it was. And she made some great stuff. She really did. But some of the stuff I couldn't eat Spam. Oh my God, what is that shit? What's in there? We used to eat that. Oh, and the smell. I remember the smell. It makes me sick. But I had to eat everything on the plate and if I didn't, I had to sit there and the whole family would go off into their bedrooms or watch TV and watching the Brady Bunch or whatever, and I'd have to sit there alone with that spam and just try to figure out how to choke it down. I think I'd have hit all those dogs. I would feed it to the dogs. I'd keep saying, hey, I got to get up and go to the bathroom, fill my mouth full of spam and spit in the toilet, but you had to eat everything on your plate. Food was sacred. Dinner time was sacred.

Speaker 1:

It was a time where we're supposed to sit around, all of us, and we're going to talk about our day. Right, my father's going to tell me about what he did at the factory. My mother's going to keep the peace. Somebody's going to ask me what I learned in school today. I don't know. I don't have an answer. I don't know. This is forced. It's tough, it's hard. We're pretending to be a family. That's communicating and we were a family. We were a loving family, but we were kids. We didn't want to be with our parents. We wanted food, right, we wanted food. So it would be awful, uncomfortable, just us sitting around trying to come up with something to talk about. Or if I had done some stupid shit my father found out about, then he would bring that up and you know, be like not that great of a situation.

Speaker 1:

We just would make it through dinner. If it was good, we'd eat it. And if it was dinner, if it was good, we'd eat it. And if it was good, we didn't just eat it, we competed for it. We ate it as fast as we frigging could to get the last piece. Everybody was hungry, everybody wanted to eat. You had to eat fast, man.

Speaker 1:

I married a girl. She was an only child. My wife, she's so funny about food. She won't let her food touch. You can't touch her food. She don't share food. She's not man.

Speaker 1:

I grew up in a big family. I will grab food off your plate. I will mix everything together. I eat so fast that I get my food all over my shirt and my mouth. And you know, because I had to eat fast, or it'd be gone fast or he'd be gone. That's how it was. We were hungry kids.

Speaker 1:

We had big families and we sat and ate dinner together. So we ate and when it was over, there was a big mess, a big mess. Somebody had to clear the dishes. Somebody was a big mess, a big mess. Somebody had to clear the dishes, somebody had to wash them, somebody had to dry them and put them away. And we rotated through the children who did it. And God help us. I mean, the cleanliness of that whole operation was terrible. We weren't really washing and boiling water or anything like that. You know, half the time we would just rinse and stack and store it away, and nothing like today's operation with the dishwashers and stuff like like that.

Speaker 1:

I remember one time we had a discussion at the dinner table where my father he had just decided they had three sisters, he had just decided that there was gonna be a separation of division labor. That now Johnny's like you know 12. He's not going to do laundry and dishes, no more. He's a man right Now. I got him on lawn detail. I got him on snow shoveling. I got him on garage cleaning. I got him in the basement. I got him helping me fix pipes. I'm going to teach him how to saw wood and stuff like this.

Speaker 1:

So I got out of all this stuff. I didn't have to do that anymore. Fold clothes, do dishes, so they, they have a family vote. My dad's like look at, we got some money here and we we think we can get one of these dishwashers and we're going to vote on it. And the vote was five to one. I was the only I had to hold out. I'm like what do we need a dishwasher for? I didn't have to do dishes. We never got the dishwasher, we didn't need it.

Speaker 1:

And then that whole system, that whole ritual, that whole elaborate communal dining family of the 70s somehow slipped away into TV trays, living rooms, television. Kids are coming and going, got jobs, moms are working, there's food in the refrigerator, cook it up, eat it up. It it broke down, and I'm not so sure I miss it. I'm not so sure it really affected society or anything like that. It's a nice idea, though, to eat dinner together, but it just didn't turn out like you would think it was a good idea. It wasn't like Wally and the Beeve sitting around with Ward and June, it was more just people trying to get food down their mouths and get out of there. Wally and the Beeve sitting around with Ward and June, it was more just people trying to get food down their mouths and get out of there.

Speaker 1:

I'll tell you one thing that I remember Is that my dad would always, if there was one piece of pizza left or one sliver of food that everybody was full, would always, if there was one piece of pizza left or one sliver of food, that everybody was full and it was me and him looking at each other, me and him. He wanted it, I wanted it, and he would always say you take that last slice of pizza. Always Little, tiny little thing it's yours. I knew he was hungry as I was, but he always did that and it seems like a small thing, but it really was kind of a big thing Because it taught me something. If I could take anything out of the dinner table tales, it was the generosity of my dad to make sure that his son was full. And I took that with me and I kind of extrapolated it into being a generous man and a provider. Just that little lesson.

Speaker 1:

It may seem quaint, nostalgic, but I remember it. I'm 65 years old and I still remember it. I remember me and my dad would golf together Now I'm in my 50s at this time and we would golf every Thursday and we would have lunch. And I remember we went to the pizzeria that had opened at the top of our street and my mom wouldn't let him go there because he had some cholesterol problems. And I remember sitting there now I'm 55, 56, he's in his 80s and we get a pizza and I'm still his son, though I'm still his little boy. He looks at me. We get down to the last slice and he looks at me and he says it's yours, take it. And I said, it's yours, take it. And I said, no, dad, you take it, it's yours. And he said, no, you take it. And I took it. I was hungry, but it taught me I never stopped being this little boy, you know. So maybe dinner time was good, maybe it was, I don't know.

Speaker 1:

I'm not a philosopher or a psychologist. I just tell stories about the baby boomers and their lifestyle that get missed by these other generations that for some reason, can't stand us, and that's it. I hope you got your steps in. I hope I got you to work. Nice drive to work, but people used to eat dinner together and it was good and it was bad and supper's ready. Okay, boomers, have a good day. Keep listening.