Onion rings and memories of courtship

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – I received an e- mail advertisement on Friday saying that tomorrow Saturday, June 22, is National Onion Ring Day.  I have no idea how such days get to be declared, or who, for that matter, gets to declare them.  However, I take the Black Bear Diner’s word for it.  The news from this El Cajon eatery about onion rings triggered a wave of nostalgia, taking me back, back, to before our more than 51 years of marriage, to the  time when my wife, Nancy, and I were dating.

We had met at a dance at the International Student Center at UCLA.  “Singrads” was the sponsoring organization.  The contracted name meant “Single Graduates.”  If you were male, you had to be a graduate student to attend the dance.  If you were female, any age would do – just so long as you were somewhere beyond puberty.  Because this meant that some people at the dance were shy of the drinking age, people had to show their ID at the door.  Over 21 won you an ink stamp on the back of your hand.  If you were under 21, you had to do without the stamp.

Nancy laughs at that memory because once the spiked punch was ladled into cups, any graduate student could take one and perhaps hand it to someone under 21, without anyone being the wiser.  However, she was determined to have her hand stamped, although she was just 18 at the time, so she kept trying to persuade the fellow whose turn it was at the door to administer to her the inky validation.  That fellow was me, and I refused, again and again.

Finally, when my turn checking driver’s licenses was over, I said to her, “I won’t stamp your hand, but I’ll dance with you, if you would like.”  The young lady liked; in fact, I found out later, her original intent was to dance with me.  Why me?  There certainly were more handsome graduate students there.  And just as certainly, there were those who were more academically accomplished.  So why did this college freshman single out me?  Of all the people at the dance, I was the only one she saw who looked (and indeed was) Jewish.  Nancy, desirous of someday raising a Jewish family, had made a rule for herself about dating only Jews.  As she put it, “You can’t control who you’ll fall in love with; but you can control who you will date in the first place.”

Onion rings?   I am getting to that.

That dance led to many dates – movies, sporting events, comedy clubs, car trips (a memorable one down to the San Diego Zoo), bowling, miniature golf – and it became our custom at the end of many of those dates to go to a large restaurant located at Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards, near UCLA, called Ship’s.  It is no longer there; the value of real estate is far too high on that section of Wilshire Boulevard to make a freestanding restaurant a best use of property.  But for us, Ship’s always will be a place of storied memory.

Our end-of-date snacks were typically hot chocolate and onion rings.  Not exactly the most healthful combination, but we were young then, and thought we could eat anything.  Besides, we didn’t gobble down our snacks, we lingered over them, as two people in love will do.  And we played Jotto, the paper-and-pencil (or pen) game in which each player tries to figure out the other’s “secret word” by testing words of the same length, and being told how many letters are the same.  It’s a fine game that builds vocabulary, alerts players to frequently occurring letter combinations, and encourages you to be deductive.

If, for example, you should pose a word in which none of the letters match, you would get a score of zero.  Next, some letters from that word can be built into another word.  When you get your next score, you already know which letters you can eliminate from consideration.

Nancy and I  both became quite proficient at the game, and later taught it to our children, Sandi and David.  Now that our oldest grandson is going off to UC Berkeley, I suppose that we should make sure he knows how to play it too – you never know when he and a young woman might be sharing some onion rings somewhere.

As for the Black Bear Diner in El Cajon, I haven’t tried that establishment’s onion rings, but I imagine if they feature them, you can get them there just the way I like them, nice and crispy on the outside, and not too hot, nor greasy, on the inside.

Also, I don’t like it when an onion ring falls apart, especially if it is greasy.

I wouldn’t want one to fall on the table and mess up my Jotto game!

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com