Just Brown And Serve

The summer Donna and I got married, in 1963,  we lived off the $65 a week I made as an intern in the Sports Department at The Charlotte News and banked the $80-some a week she made as stenographer for the FBI.

I was going back to school in the fall, I was a rising sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,  and we tried to save on everything.  That summer we lived in an attic apartment of a house on Shenandoah Avenue, with no phone and no air conditioning.   Not that we cared all that much — we were 21.

Donna, who was still learning to cook, tried to save on food, too.  One night she cooked stew beef and we both chewed and chewed and chewed.   

It was stew beef, but not like this.
It was stew beef, but not like this.

That was about the toughest meat I’d ever tried to eat and finally I said, “Donna, I think we can afford to pay a little bit more next time and get some meat that’s not quite so tough.”

But, turned out, the meat wasn’t the problem.  My bride had boiled the stew beef for 10 or 15 minutes, until it turned brown, and then served it.

NOTE: Donna should have boiled that meat, her Momma told her later, for two hours.

Coming Monday: The Bean Counter

An Unfair Advantage

When I was a married student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill my wife, Donna, and I lived in Victory Village and I played a lot of Hearts with my neighbors, who were also students.

IMG_3973Hearts is a relatively simple game, child’s play compared to bridge. Even so, to win against good players you have to count cards, you need to know what’s been played, who is void, and how many cards are left in each suit.  You have to  concentrate.

We took turns hosting the game.  Sometimes games didn’t start until after midnight, after everyone had finished their homework. But if we started playing early enough in the evening, the host’s wife would serve a snack, a soft drink and some cookies maybe.

One guy’s wife dressed a little bit funny.

She wore old-timey dresses. Her skirts were long, right to the floor.  Her sleeves were long too, down to her wrists. But her dresses were exceeding low in the front. And when she leaned to refill someone’s drink it was easy to lose your concentration, forget your card count.

I didn’t look, of course.

But I did notice that when we played at their apartment the rest of us didn’t play very well, and he won more often than not.

Coming Friday: A Stupid Mistake