Five For a Dollar

Being a college arts major in the 1970s required creative survival strategies.  This was true in every arts field--visual, music, theater, whatever.  As a rule of thumb, few who studied art had rich parents.  Most, particularly at a state university, were surviving on student aid, loans, money saved from summer and part time jobs, some subtle forms of grift, and, in my case, my GI Bill.  (In the 1970s, the Bill allotment paid a whopping $175 a month--during the school year only.)  But I could live on it, paying $80 a month in rent, and was going to a state school that charged $150 a semester full time tuition.

We all lived in cheap old housing, almost slums, with lots of roommates; our clothing consisted of blue jeans, t shirts, sweatshirts, and winter coats from Goodwill--males and females.  And, of course, we had multiple strategies for eating on the cheap.  No one was better at this than Big R.

Don’t get me wrong.  We were pretty much happy as could be, doing art we loved with people we loved--and the group produced some VERY successful people, including two academy award winners, a couple of Golden Globe winners, and successful people in a variety of arts-related jobs and industries.  As they say, “Do what you love. The success will follow.”

But we were poor.  There certainly weren’t any Frat boys or Sorority girls hobnobbing with the “hippie artsy fartsy bunch.”

Back to the food strategies, and the stomach tactics of Big R.  Some of the group had found ways to qualify for Government Commodities--a forerunner of Food Stamps, and picked up weekly boxes of pasta, cheese blocks, and peanut butter from a county loading dock down on Commercial Street, and we all share communally.  And, of course, student frugality also meant knowing where to get the cheapest beer and Strawberry Hill wine.  Our supermarket safaris consisted of searches for cheap, bulk, on sale food, or near food, like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese at five boxes for a dollar.  Spam on sale, (and even some of the “house brand” Spam knock offs).  We ALL gathered at a local greasy spoon named “Casper’s” on every Friday. The café was housed in a surplus WWII metal building. Casper’s great claim to fame was their grilled ham sandwich on a bun. They sold more than you’d imagine.  Every Friday, they would take all of the leftover ham bones from that week and make them up with Navy Beans to offer as an “all you can eat” with corn bread for 99 cents.  Since Casper’s was owned by a local artist, Chuck Lederer, it was the default Friday dining destination—the finest in Quonset Hut Cuisine.

A couple of other strategies Big R followed, and some of the rest joined in with, was the Tuesday 15 Cent Coney Day at the A&W drive in--and a carhop brought them out to you.  R would eat several sitting in his car on the parking lot, then get a bag to go, and eat them cold from his refrigerator for several days. AND there was the Wednesday Pizza Buffet at the Pizza Hut. (No CiCi’s in those antediluvian days.)  It ran from 11:00 til 3:00, and The R would take full advantage.  He’d arrive at about 30 seconds past eleven, and feast until three.  Getting up and walking around occasionally to “take a smoke and shake it down.”  If he was on his game, he’d need no dinner that night, nor breakfast or lunch on Thursday. He could get that full.  As luck would have it, these two establishments were right across the street from each other on Sunshine just West of Campbell.  Maybe two miles from the campus.

The previously noted supermarket strategies were mostly practiced at an older neighborhood Safeway.  This was a small store by supermarket standards--especially today’s standards.  It was a 50s throwback to the beginnings of the transition from corner grocery stores to supermarkets.  Some of the group would arrive for an evening shopping excursion in a chemically altered state--usually involving having been in proximity to small quantities of Mexican weeds burning in Zig Zag papers.  On those trips, in addition to the bulk sale items, the checkout clerk was likely to see bags of Fritos, Doritos, Potato Chips, boxes of Screaming Yellow Zonkers, cans of Vienna Weiners, and even, occasionally, fried pork rinds and Tabasco—one must temper one’s frugality with attention to existential needs.

It was such an early evening trip that I write about. Three or 4 of us went in, and scattered throughout the store. Big R marching to a REALLY cosmic drummer. In those days, in that type of store, all frozen foods were sold from “coffin freezers”.  Open top freezers running down the middle of the store.  Specials and such were announced by hand-lettered poster board signs. Any one of an age will remember the signage style of inch wide red, blue, and black markers on the white board. 

As we all finished our forage, we went in search of the absent R.  He stood at the end of one of the coffin freezers, staring quizzically and fixedly at a 3x3 sign that announced, “Banquet Pot Pies, 5 for $1.”  On approach we heard R muse, “Wow, and I didn’t even know they’d made it legal.”