By Sherman Shifflett
(ed. Note: My good friend, the late Sherman Shifflett, sent me this article back in 2019, and it’s worth reprinting)
There were 11 children in my family and mom said I was the only one who did not like peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches. It didn’t make sense because I like peanuts and I like grape jelly. Go figure.
But Mom mixed things up and we seldom complained. A few times I was embarrassed because I had biscuits and the other kids had “light bread”. Hell, I shouldn’t have been embarrassed because my ham biscuit (with mayo or mustard) was probably better than what they had. Most of the time we had light bread for sandwiches, but often had ham biscuits, sausage biscuits, scrambled egg biscuit and biscuits with fried apples. That was damned good.
I even liked bologna sandwiches, but I liked the bologna fried almost black. And I could eat Spam sandwiches, although I was not crazy about it. One kid at Covesville Elementary ate grated carrots with mayo on light bread. I had never seen that before, or since. One of my sisters fixed sour cream and cucumber sandwiches.
Cheese sandwiches were popular, too. We’d purchase a wedge of cheese from the general store. We also had lettuce and tomato sandwiches. Some siblings took cottage cheese in a small container, but I never liked that. Pimento cheese sandwiches? That was okay, nothing special. When we killed hogs, we had tenderloin sandwiches. That’s something I never shared.
We always had a piece of fruit and dessert. Usually we had an apple (we lived around the apple orchards). Most of the time our dessert was a piece of dried apple or peach. And, we had candy at school we could purchase. It was 5 cents per candy bar. Soft drinks, too, were nickel a pop.
One time I left my lunch box at Covesville Elementary School, and the following morning Mom informed me she was out of brown paper bags. She packed my lunch in a lard tin with bail. I was embarrassed, but the kids on the bus and kids at school thought it was neat.
Sometimes during the winter we took a thermos with soup – vegetable beef, potato, etc. Mom made good potato soup with lots of black pepper, celery, onions, and big chunks of potatoes.
I still have my lunch box from elementary school. We did not have a cafeteria at Covesville Elementary. Dad called it a “sawmill lunch-box.” Not a flat lunch box, but a more up-right metal box and the thermos was stored in the top portion. Not a miner’s lunch box either. That was round.
When I got to Red Hill Elementary, I generally ate in the cafeteria. Sometimes at Albemarle High School, I would “brown bag” it. Some of the athletes would meet in the locker room and eat lunch together. We left our lunches in the coach’s office.
Mom packed lunches for my younger sisters so she insisted on packing mine too. One year, several weeks after school had started, Mom asked me if I was tired of the Twinkies”. I told her I had never seen the Twinkies and wondered why she had left out the dessert.
I generally got ice cream in the cafeteria. Anyway, someone had been taking my Twinkies. The coach’s office was seldom locked. I did not say a word to the lunch buddies. But I did ask mom to make a chocolate-chip cake. She did, and I laced it with a big slice with ex-lax. Sure enough, the cake disappeared. I didn’t say a word, but I never had any more problems with my lunches.