[hardhead]

Fast food in the 40s was margarine that was pre-mixed - you didn't have to sit there and stir the food coloring packet into the white margarine - but it cost more and who had any money? Buying meat at a butcher shop and not packaged in a lot of plastic at Walmart. I seem to remember my parents giving me a quarter once a month on a Saturday. The quarter would get me into a double feature, a cartoon, a short subject, a bag of popcorn and a nickle soda. We grew everything - everything - we used except flour, coffee and sugar. I caught fish, picked berries and sold them to housewives for pies, went crabbing (Eastern shore boy), dug sassafras, wild onions, lambs quarters, gatherned nuts, and all for free. We didn't have any money and didn't worry about it.

[Bernard Marx]

I remember mixing the margarine in the 40s -- I always thought it was amazing you could get such nice yellow from a tiny little orange package.

But the small Idaho town where I was raised had an A & W Root Beer joint that served wonderful hamburgers. It had car hops with trays that attached to the windows. On some of those 108 to 112 degree July and August days, there was absolutely nothing more wonderful than seeing those frosted big glass mugs being taken out of the freezer and filled with creamy root beer! Wow!

My mother and I lived with an aunt and her husband welded Liberty Ships north of San Francisco. She wrote him a letter every night and we kids would often ride with her to the Post Office to mail them. Money was very, very tight but if she was in a really good mood she'd treat us to an A & W hamburger and root beer. That was pure heaven and it didn't happen very often. After all these years I can still practically taste them. Anyhow, that was our 1940s version of "fast food" -- but every burger was cooked to order so it wasn't all that fast.