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.
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