The Lost Art of Packing a Lunch

I'm not sure what made me think about brown bag lunches and high school. It could be that the holidays always bring back memories of growing up in Pittsburgh. Or it may have just been that genoa salami sandwich that reminded me of Labriola's, the Italian Store where my family shopped on Larimer Avenue.

When I attended Sacred Heart High School in Pittsburgh way back in the 1960's, I carried a brown bag lunch. I didn't walk up hill both ways to school but I did walk down a steep one to catch a street car.  Since most of us used public transportation to get to school, we rarely had a day off due to weather. I remember there was an informal rule that if your bus or street car didn't arrive after waiting an hour, you got the day off.  That almost never happened.  I guess public transportation was pretty reliable back then.

My mom, like many in that decade, was a stay at home mom. One of her most important jobs (at least to me) was packing lunches and she was particularly good at it.  Being Italian, my brown bag offered some hidden treasures that other brown bags didn't include, like home made biscotti, rolled cream cheese finger sandwiches, and stuffed artichokes. Leftover cold pizza made with rolled out dough from scratch was a weekly favorite and I'd often sneak a bite for breakfast. We didn't have all the pre-packaged snacks you can buy today so it wasn't unusual to find a piece of fudge or some pizzelles wrapped in aluminum foil.

You could only buy white milk at Sacred Heart High School. Soda, or "pop" as it is known in Pittsburgh, wasn't available for sale. For a few weeks one year, a bunch of us packed frozen pop in our brown bags. We discovered that by lunch time, the pop would thaw and our drink would be at the perfect temperature. Unfortunately one day during lunch, my can exploded from the pressure and the spray targeted a nearby nun.  An intercom announcement declared the end of the frozen pop experiment forever. Bummer.

My son Jeff was also a brown bagger. Ledyard High School didn't resume their hot lunch program until several years after he graduated. I tried to be as creative as my mom but I'm not sure I ever reached her level of perfection. In fact, I'm sure I didn't.

I haven't thought about brown bag lunches or soaking a nun with pop for years so I paid a visit today to  Ledyard High School's website and took a peek at their menu offerings. Besides the typical choices of salads, grinders, pizzas and hamburgers, there are daily specials like Nachos Grande, Buffalo Chicken Wrap, and Maple Roasted Pork.  The $2.50 menu seems pretty reasonable and I'm sure far better than the typical brown bag ham and cheese or peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I was pretty happy to see the return of a hot lunch program to Ledyard High School while I was on the Board of Education.

We had a hot lunch program at Sacred Heart High School. I vaguely remember macaroni and cheese and meat loaf on the menu. I never even considered buying lunch as an option. No one could pack a lunch better than my mom.

Eva Antoinette Mannella died in 1969, a year after I graduated from high school. I still love stuffed artichokes and cold pizza.