Weiner dog the wrong breed (April11)

Do not eat hot dogs!

                        by Robert LaFrance

            One day about 1970 I was home from Toronto and visiting my grandfather Nelson “Muff” LaFrance. I had arrived just in time for an elegant dinner of boiled hot dogs and store-bought white bread. Yum!

            Even back in those historical days, scientists and other humans were questioning the wisdom of eating hot dogs, franks and wieners (all the same) because how they were made would knock a cat off a gut-cart as the old saying goes.

            “What else do you eat, Grampy?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

            “I had a potato last month, but generally I eat what you see – boiled hot dogs wrapped with white Karnes bread. I like Karnes bread. It’s made right in Woodstock, in that bakery that has the duck pond out front, or so they tell me. I never was past Florenceville.”

            It was true too. South from Tilley was a land that, if he had studied Latin as I had, he would call ‘terra incognito’, the unknown place. However, to the northeast he had travelled many times in his younger years when he went away in December to cut logs in the Riley Brook-Long Lake area. In March he would come home rich as a prince after collecting his $18 a month wages.

            Back to the subject of hot dogs, wieners etc., Grampy sure enjoyed his hot dogs and so did I enjoy mine. Back in school whenever I went to the spring in the woods up behind the Michaud house and brought him a couple of pails of water, I had timed it so I could arrive at his house at 5:00 pm, his supper time.

            One day we were munching down on hot dogs and the mailman (Gib Mowbray perhaps?) dropped off a letter for Grampy. Since I was there, he left my Popular Science magazine. Imagine my surprise when the lead story was entitled “Franks can kill you!” It referred of course, since it was an American magazine, to hot dogs. I learned that the hot dog and roll I was holding contained enough nitrates, nitrites, strontium 90, and bacteria to lay low Napoleon’s 7^th Cavalry.

            I went over and neatened the blankets on Grampy’s bed. “I guess you won’t make it until morning young man,” I said. “According to this magazine story, even eating five hot dogs a month was enough to lay low Louis Cyr, the famous Quebec giant, or Paul Bunyan. What chance do you have, Grampy? Better quit eating hot dogs.” He vowed he would, whenever he could sit on his porch chair and see pigs flying over. However, we made arrangements for me to call the priest when the time drew near.

            It is too bad he didn’t follow my advice and that of the brilliant American scientists; he could have ‘lived to a ripe old age’. As it was, he continued eating hot dogs to the end, and died in March of 1976, at the age of 94. Without hot dogs he probably would have made his 95^th birthday two weeks later.

            You’d better sit down, because in writing this column I actually did some research into the gourmet fare we call hot dogs. An Ottawa based health organization reported:  “The raw meat materials used for precooked-cooked products (hot dogs) are lower-grade muscle trimmings, fatty tissues, head meat, animal feet, animal skin, blood, liver and other edible slaughter by-products."

            Yum! I can’t think of anything I’d rather eat, according to that description. But seriously, I ate two hot dogs day before yesterday, and they were delicious. Cooked with onions and with the right amounts of the right kind of mustard and relish – and sometimes catsup – they remind me of the days when I watched baseball games in Toronto. This was long before the Blue Jays, but the Montréal Expos were doing well. I lived in Scarborough, and the Expos even came to Toronto one weekend for two exhibition games with the Scarborough Saints. After the game, members of both teams ended up in the Snooty Aardvark, a bar along St. Clair Avenue, not far from the Scarborough Bluffs area where I worked. Note: Those baseball players weren’t saints. The language!

            Along about midnight, there was a general call for food, something not served, other than Doritos, at the Snooty Aardvark, so the assistant bartender offered to go down the street and get what amounted to about 150 hot dogs in buns. Nobody got sick, even after he returned with the second lot of 150. So you see, this is the proof that hot dogs are ‘the Breakfast of Champions’ even when eaten by athletes at midnight in Toronto. Grampy was an unrecognized genius. Unrecognized by everyone but me anyway.

Now I think I’ll make some supper. All this typing has made me hungry for some meat, but since I’m out of meat I’ll settle for hot dogs.
                                                 -end-