[ansel12]

When I was a little boy, the finest meal I ever had was from two old ladies cooking in their home (a house? I was very young) and serving men at a huge table, it was home style where you passed the large bowls and the platters to each other, and at least one of the stoves was in the same room as the table, the best cooks in the world, “grandmother cooking” of the forgotten past.

Back then my dad tried to explain that if you bought a place to live, look for one that could serve as a boarding house, for additional income.

[riverdawg]

Many young women, including my mother, migrated to urban areas during WWII to work in the defense industry. The first place they lived was often a boarding house like the one you described, but exclusively for women. Some of the women stayed indefinitely and others paired up and moved out to shared apartments after a few months.

Some of the old timers I know remember eating lunch at boarding houses near their place of employment. The boarders were fed breakfast and dinner, but the public could eat a home-cooked lunch there for a dollar or so.