Two for a Quarter: When Eating Out Was an Occasion

I read that the average family now eats restaurant food several times a week. I am not here to scold anybody, but I will tell you what eating out looked like for us, because the difference says a lot about how family budgets have changed.

When our family went out to eat, the whole bill might come to ten or twelve dollars, and we did not go anywhere expensive. It happened less than once a month, really. Maybe once every two weeks at the very most, when things were good. And because it was rare, it meant something. The kids remembered it. It was an occasion, not a habit.

My father had a tradition of taking the family to Mr. Steak on Sundays. That was his treat, and he picked up the check. Those Sunday dinners are some of the best memories we have, and I would point out that they cost him a fraction of what a fast food run costs a family today, adjusted or not.

Then there was Tucker’s. Anybody from Fond du Lac knows Tucker’s hamburgers. Two for a quarter. You heard me right. Two hamburgers for twenty five cents. There were two Tucker’s locations, one on South Main, which is still there, and one that is now on Johnson Street. When you can feed a boy two hamburgers for a quarter, you let him have the second one.

Fish fries were their own institution. We went maybe once a month, and it picked up during Lent, when all of a sudden everybody in town was going to fish fries on Fridays, whether they were Catholic or not. We were not, and we went anyway. We would go to Lakeside Park, or the Capelles, or the Anchor Inn on North Park. A Wisconsin fish fry was affordable, it was social, and it was local. The money you spent stayed in town.

For school lunch, I brown bagged it. I brought my own lunch every day, and I will tell you, we had so much fun in that lunchroom that the lunch ladies would not even come in while we were eating, because we picked on everybody right to their faces. A bag lunch never held a boy back socially, whatever anyone tells you.

The thread running through all of it is that a treat was a treat because it was rare, and the everyday meal was cooked at home from simple things. That habit kept thousands of Wisconsin families solvent through decades when money was tight. When I inspect an old supper club or a corner restaurant building today, I think about how many family occasions those walls held, and how much of that material and that history is worth carrying forward instead of hauling to a landfill.