These
are both Cat Stevens instrumentals. “Doves”, according to the “liner notes” in
the box set, On the Road to Find Out, was used at concerts to check tuning of
the various
musician’s instruments., while “Crab Dance” was the “B” side to the
45 RPM (“What the heck
is a 45, old man?”) of “Sitting” from 1973.
Being a
“B” side reminds me of a “B” side I used to play when my dad was flush with
Illinois Bell overtime pay and we would go to an Elgin bar and grill called
Leitner’s and he
would give me a quarter
to play 3 songs on the juke box, one of which was the “B” side to the
beautiful
“Morning Has Broken”, “I Wanna Live in a Wigwam.”
The
burgers at Leitner’s were the best. The cook would use an ice cream scoop to
get a wad of beef, place it on the grill top, then press it flat. The edges
would get a little crisp
and we would always order them with “the works”, which
was mustard, pickles, and chopped
onions, which is how I order every hamburger
(and hot dog or polish, see # 63) to this day).
The
closest burger to a Leitner’s today is a Steak and Shake, a thin burger with
crisp
edges, though nowadays the buns are always oversized to fill you up with
bread, as opposed to
burger.
If my
dad was really flush with cash we would get burgers at Leitner’s, then drive a
couple blocks down Rt. 25 to Burns’ Pharmacy, where we would get marshmallow
malts to go,
then drive to nearby Lord’s Park to eat them by the “zoo” that was
there. It was a zoo in the
sense that animals were held behind bars there, but
I don’t recall many truly wild animals. I have
photos from a book called
“Picturesque Elgin, 1902”, showing the zoo with a bear in one of the
cages. The
zoo is long gone, and the park is now home to a petting zoo, with buffalo and
deer
running loose in a fenced in area.
“Al’s
Café” in downtown Elgin, bought the soda fountain and recipe from Burns’, but I
have never had a malt there that compares to Burns’. They don’t seem to use the
same amount
of malt and they definitely don’t use the same amount of
marshmallow, because it’s just not the
same. The closest I’ve found is
Culver’s, but even they don’t use the same amount of malt.
Another
long gone Elgin institution we would occasionally visit was Morris’ Bar-B-Que,
on Business route 20 (Villa st). I don’t remember much about it except that the
small, low
building had numerous white, porcelain pigs on the roof.
We
didn’t eat out that much when I was growing up. We were solidly lower middle
class, we owned a house, but didn’t have
a lot of discretionary funds and, living in Algonquin,
there were very few
restaurants. In Algonquin, in the 1960’s
Port Edward, today a nice upscale
seafood restaurant, was then a pizza/burger joint, next to Harnish’s Phillips 66 gas station
(now the parking lot fronting route 62). The nearest McDonald’s was in Elgin,
10 miles away.
There was a restaurant at the NW corner of routes 62 and 31, now
a gas station, called
Simonini’s. It was a ritzy place, but we never ate there,
and it burned down in 1974.
We ate
a lot at home obviously, I remember a lot of dinners of fried egg sandwiches,
or waffles, or fried chicken, or spaghetti which my mom cooked. Occasionally
she would cook
one of my dad’s favorites, liver and onions. She would also fry
up a pound of bacon, and I could
stomach the liver if I wrapped each bite in
bacon and onions.
My mom
also made a favorite of mine, where she would mix ground beef with
chopped
onions. Then spread a thin coating onto one half of a hamburger bun then place them
under the broiler. I miss those….
The
list of Elgin restaurants now long gone is endless…
Hurdle’s:
a diner/restaurant I’d go to after every adjustment of my braces, before the
pain started, for an olive burger and a slice of apple pie with melted cheddar
cheese.
Woolworth’s
and Kresge’s: two “dime stores” across
the street from each other,each
had a lunch counter.
Dieterle’s:
a fine German restaurant.
Lazarra’s:
the best thin crust pizza I’ve ever had. And hot fudge sundaes for dessert.
There
was a little diner, can’t recall the name, across the street from the Crocker
Theater, in the corner of the Sears parking lot. I remember a burger there with
my best friend,
Jimmy D, when his dad took us to see “The 3 Stooges Go Around
the World in a Daze” (a
Curly Joe from 1963). I was all of 8 years old, but I
remember sitting at the counter enjoying a
burger .
And
recent losses like the Gasthaus, another German restaurant that bit the dust in
the
last few years, and the Bangkok House, a Thai/Chinese restaurant I
frequented for almost 25+
years when it went belly-up a couple years ago, and
then the Green Jade, a Chinese restaurant
that closed last year.
Not
that there aren’t acceptable restaurants around now, there’s more than enough
good places, it’s just that it’s sorta sad when pretty much everything from
your youth is gone,
and I can’t expose my kids to the glories of a Leitner’s burger
and a Burns’ malt.
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