From Small Town Tales, Copyright © 1997 by Sidney Hall, Jr.

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One delightful, breezy summer day in 1961, I sat alone at our dining room table in my white T-shirt, rolled up dungarees and black sneakers, my butched head almost as bare as my arms, and I looked down at the sandwich my mother had brought me for lunch, a slice of pale baloney stained with yellow mustard, and a piece of flat processed cheese between two die-cut rectangles of bread as white as sugar, on a plate designed to withstand a blow against the concrete wall of an air-raid shelter. All this was considered completely normal for a ten year old boy in those days. In fact, I loved baloney sandwiches, and I dove in greedily.

Little did I know that, in the next few months, I would undergo a luncheon meat crisis that would put me twenty years ahead of the rest of America. We were into the sixties. The news was full of John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs. It would be a decade of staggering turmoil and upheaval.

My father’s stitching business was located in the upstairs of the building that held the town’s Red & White grocery store. We had our own access to the store by the back stairs, both day and night. So my father passed by a cardboard box many times a week, where he deposited our name on a slip of paper to enter a sales promotion contest to win a giant baloney. He dreamed of keeping a family of seven supplied with their baloney needs indefinitely.

Naturally, we won this thing. Jubilantly, we drove down to the store to retrieve it. A photographer from the Brookline News was there to take a picture of two of my brothers, my sister and myself standing in front of the store holding this sixty-five pound baloney that was strapped to a board and spanned the length of the four of us standing side by side. It was not just long. It had the diameter of a 78-rpm record.

We lashed it onto the top of the car and took it home and hauled it onto the dining room table. Immediately we engaged in a reevaluation of our high spirits. It would have been easier to cope with a telephone pole blown down in a hurricane and left lying across our dining room table than to figure out how we were going to use this meat without wasting it.

My father ticked off some marks and cut off equal segments for our friends and company employees. These were wrapped separately and carried by car to various locations around town. But we were still left with a mammoth amount of sandwich meat, and there was nothing to do but start contriving our diet around it.

The first week we ate baloney every day from about 10 o’clock on. (I don’t remember that we ever stooped to having it for breakfast.) I indulged in my loyalty to baloney before, during and after school and every night. It was a baloney paradise for me. I couldn’t get enough. I didn’t care how many animals of what species it took to make it, and I didn’t worry that just one piece rolled up with mustard was really enough to make a meal in itself. I’d eat two or three pieces at a time.

After more than a week of this, I was sitting again at the table, biting into a baloney and cheese sandwich when a certain indefinable and unearthly nausea arrived like a stray dog to roam among my taste buds. I felt this nausea spread like a bad rumor into the lobes of my brain, and then flee from there, like a criminal, into the protection of my stomach and intestines. My hair stood on end as the revulsion passed over my whole body.

That was the end. I could not touch another piece of baloney for about twenty years, and even today I have trouble thinking of eating that stuff, though now my kids are dabbling in it, partly, I think, as a form of protest against my irrational prejudice. But I’m a child of the sixties. I came of age with the help of a six-foot-long promotional baloney and learned the hard way that you really can get too much of a bad idea.

I also know I’d never have learned this if I hadn’t loved baloney so much. And now I’ve told you everything I know about luncheon meat.

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