THEIR BUSINESS IS PEANUTS
Guzzling and gorging at stadiums, arenas and racetracks is an American tradition with an anthem all its own: "Take me out to the ball game.... Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack." That ditty was written in 1908, and even then little boys and grown men loved the juicy splat when they bit into mustard-smeared hot dogs. The crunch of peanut shells underfoot was as satisfying as hiking over crisp autumn leaves. Spectators washed their insides with so much sugary soda pop that they left for home with the same body chemistry as a jelly doughnut.
Today's sports fans are still happy gluttons to whom the crack of a bat or a kickoff whistle sounds like a dinner gong. Consider what this means to the concessionaire, the man with exclusive rights to peddle goodies to the crowd. He has 5,000 to 100,000 potential customers trapped for several hours in the appetizing atmosphere of the grandstand—the smell of hamburgers sizzling on the grill, the invigorating spray of frosty beer from the cup of an enthusiastic arm-waving rooter. In an average year the captive audience at U.S. sports events runs to some 200 million who spend considerably more than that in dollars.
The concessionaire calls his business "mass feeding," an in-trade term that makes the fan sound like just another steer being fattened on a ranch. But the business is massive. In a crowd of 55,000 people at Dodger Stadium, 43,000 hot dogs will be sold. During a typical Dodger-Giant weekend series, 276 gallons of chopped onions, 84 cases of relish and 42 cases of mustard flavor the dogs and burgers. Food and drink at the third World Series game in L.A. last year brought the concessionaire $81,604. Seventy bushels of mint are used at the Kentucky Derby each year just to adorn the juleps. Forbes Field is the only major league park where beer is not sold, but the average Pittsburgher still spends from 50¢ to 70¢ on his appetite at a single game and as much as 90¢ at a double-header. On a big handicap day at a major racetrack it is not unusual for 50,000 people to splurge $75,000, besides what they shell out for bets, parking and programs. In one stretch of 21 games at Busch Stadium in St. Louis last year the fans consumed 28,000 hamburgers, 35,000 cups of coffee, 61,000 boxes of popcorn, 100,000 bags of peanuts, 200,000 hot dogs and a Niagara Falls of beer and soda pop (661,000 cups).
Through a process of survival of the sharpest, this captive-audience catering has bred a shrewd, tough species. The modern concessionaire is capable of telling immediately after an event whether one too many paper napkins was used or one patron got a nickel too much in change. He has the ever-suspicious eyes of a Las Vegas pit boss and the psychological know-how to predict exactly when and why the guy in Section A, Seat 17 will feel a hunger pang.
He knows, for example, that his highest baseball profits will come from a daytime doubleheader when the air is humid and the home team takes a big lead early in each game. He knows 30% of his sales will come when the crowd enters, only 5% when it leaves. He knows that a man hawking salted peanuts should always be trailed by a man selling Cokes. And he knows that a man chewing gum will not buy anything, that a horse-racing patron is nervous and therefore will eat a lot (long intermissions help, too), that track and field nuts are too busy with stopwatches to be tempted by food and that boxing fans drink much and eat little.
Not that concessionaires mind people drinking, as long as the liquid brings in a profit. Unfortunately, water is free, and concessionaires dislike any competition, especially something that cheap. So they usually make fountains scarce. It is an old joke at arid Madison Square Garden that if someone faints he will have to be revived by a pail of beer in his face. Seamy Chicago Stadium is just as bad, but the management did install fountain attachments to some lavatory washbowls about two years ago.
When plush Dodger Stadium was being built, hardly a detail was overlooked, especially the detail of overlooking fountains. Somehow, in a sports palace seating 56,000 people, the only fountains were in the two dugouts and Owner Walter O'Malley's offices. The public and the press put up a fuss, leading a defensive Dodger official to point out that there were 221 water faucets. An indignant woman customer replied to this announcement: "I don't mind bucking the crowds when I go to the ladies' room, but I draw the line at sticking my snout under the tap." Before the L.A. health department finally ordered fountains installed, an enterprising 11-year-old boy set up shop near one entrance with a wagonload of the precious fluid and a sign: "Last Chance to Get Water."
The frugal baseball fans of Milwaukee do not care much for water (without hops and malt added), so they competed with the concessionaires by bringing their own brew to the ball park, paying 12¢ to 18¢ outside for what would have cost 30¢ a cup inside. When the city council banned carry-in beer in 1961, a public-spirited committee fought the ban and got it repealed in 1962, proclaiming, "Future generations will remember us gratefully." (In Atlanta next season premium beer will be 50¢.)
Harry Curland, concessions boss at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park racetracks, used to run the operation at the Los Angeles Coliseum and also had some problems with competing customers. He recalls that for months a certain brand of candy bar was giving him nightmares. "I'd see people eating these bars and see the wrappers," he says, "and I couldn't figure out where they were coming from. I didn't sell them. Then one hot summer day I saw this woman wearing a huge, expansive coat, meandering about the crowd. I had seen her before, but something told me to follow her.
"Then I spotted her selling a candy bar. Inside that greatcoat she had pocket after pocket full of hot dogs, buns, pop, candy bars, popcorn, Cracker Jack, everything. She was ruining our concessions and with no overhead!"
Curland, like other concessionaires, has had to be as alert with his own employees as with the customers. His men used to pack their own peanut bags and then roll the ends, until Curland discovered they were getting up extra packages by stealing a few peanuts out of each bag. "Instead of accounting for 100 bags," he says, "they might have 110 and make a clear profit on the 10." Harry started printing and filling his own bags and sealing both ends.
In the early days at the Coliseum, orangeade was sold out of large cans equipped with spigots, each vendor receiving enough for 50 cups. The sharpies among them would add water and get 60 diluted drinks, until Curland sealed the lids with padlocks. Lemon soda was a tougher problem. "It looks almost like water," he says. "The hawkers would fill up the empties with water, ram the caps back on, check the bottles in as returns and get a refund. We wouldn't know anything until the next show when the customer would complain."
Myron O'Brisky of Forbes Field borrowed a New York concessionaire's trick to ease a missing-peanut crisis many years ago. He discovered that his young hawkers were eating peanuts as they filled the bags, so he plugged the leak by issuing each boy a stick of gum. "Ever try eating peanuts and chewing gum?" he asked his impressed associates.
The late Harry Stevens once noticed that sales of consommé were decreasing and sales of tea were unaccountably rising at one of his racetrack restaurants. He finally found the answer when a waiter tripped and spilled some pills out of his pocket. They turned out to be consommé-concentrate tablets. Waiters were taking the 15¢ tea ingredients out of the kitchen, throwing away the tea bags and plopping pills into the hot water to make 30¢ soup. They pocketed the 15¢ difference, and the checkers in the kitchen were none the wiser.
Employee error and cheating are so common in the business that concessionaires over the years have developed intricate systems and gadgets to protect themselves and the customers, but mostly themselves. Head Chef Max Egloff of Arlington Park and Washington Park racetracks was unhappy because his carvers put widely varying amounts of meat in the hot sandwiches, so he designed an electronic corned-beef and roast-beef carver. Push a button and the machine cuts three ounces of meat and keeps count of the sandwiches made. The attendant, who needs no special skills, cannot take any meat out until exactly three ounces fall into a locked compartment. Another device, the AutoBAR, locks onto an upside-down liquor bottle and gives forth precisely one ounce of booze each time the bartender pulls the trigger. It costs about $70 but instantly eliminates the barman's jolly fun of earning tips by overpouring.
A favorite concessionaire system is to use cups as a control on sales of beverages. If five beer cups are used, there should be the money for five beers in the cash register. This can lead to difficulties, however, as it did when Lou Mohs, general manager of the Los Angeles Lakers pro basketball team, found that he had run out of paper cups for the team benches. He hurried over to a Sports Arena concessions counter and asked for two dozen cups. When the attendant demanded $6, Mohs jumped higher than Elgin Baylor.
The concessions manager at one racetrack keeps tabs on his bartenders with the aid of several well-placed peepholes. He is a fastidious man who looks and dresses like a distinguished diplomat. Tiptoeing behind a row of unused mutuel windows, he gets down on his hands and knees and chuckles diabolically as he uncovers a hole looking straight down on a cash register one floor below. One day he watched a bartender reusing beer cups in order to keep the 50¢ from the second sale. Pocketing the money right away would have been much too obvious, however, so the bartender kept track of each theft by putting a penny in an unused compartment of the cash register. At the end of the day he counted the pennies and settled with himself.
One peephole used by the concessionaire was so far above a counter that he had to employ binoculars, but the bartenders soon got wise and behaved themselves when they spotted the gleam of the glasses overhead. Our hero's next move was simple. He left the binoculars on the hole all afternoon.
Oldest of the mass-feeding firms is Harry M. Stevens, Inc., a closed corporation in which only 15 blood descendants of the founder hold stock. The family runs the concessions at 36 horse tracks, four dog tracks, three baseball stadiums and the New York Coliseum. The Stevens grandstand specialty since the turn of the century has been the hot dog, a wiener laid to rest in a warm bun (well, it is supposed to be warm) and covered with mustard, relish, chopped onion, chili sauce or whatever else will look good on a customer's tie. It is the dog, as the saying goes, that "feeds the hand that bites it."
Legend says old Harry Stevens himself was the genius who first combined an elongated roll and a frankfurter sausage (also known as a weenie, wiener, red-hot, frank or tube steak), but legend is most likely wrong. Some sources claim the originator was a Bavarian sausage peddler at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Anyway, Stevens did popularize the hot dog as a grandstand delicacy by introducing it one cold day about 1900 at New York's Polo Grounds. And everybody agrees the name "hot dog" was coined by cartoonist T. A. (TAD) Dorgan, a close friend of Harry's. A Dorgan cartoon of that period shows a dachshund, wrapped in a bun, barking, "Balogna."
Stevens came to America from England in 1881 and eventually settled in Niles, Ohio. In 1887 he was touring Ohio selling copies of a book by a Civil War general when he noticed the inept scorecard operation at the Columbus ball park and took it over for $500. He quickly sold $700 worth of ads and quit the bookselling business for good. He dabbled in scorecard sales in Toledo, Boston, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, often hawking in the stands himself. Dressed in a scarlet jacket and spouting quotations from Shakespeare, he became a minor celebrity—Scorecard Harry. "They all look alike on the field," went one spiel. "Buy 5¢ worth of independence, gents—5¢, five pennies, a nickel only, and get the names of all the players. Be an independent American citizen. Don't depend on your neighbor for the score when you can get an official guide, directory, souvenir and keepsake for a nick." He is credited with creating that giant of the American idiom, "You can't tell the players without a scorecard."
In Pittsburgh, Stevens was in partnership with Ed Barrow, then a struggling baseball executive. When Harry seized the chance to move to New York's Polo Grounds and take over the food sales as well as the scorecards, Barrow decided to stay with baseball. "We dissolved our partnership," said Barrow. "Stevens headed for New York and millions. I turned to the Atlantic League." (Their friendship lasted, though. In 1925 Stevens loaned Barrow $350,000 to buy 10% of the New York Yankees.)
Before the hot dog debut at the Polo Grounds, Stevens sold hard-boiled eggs, coconut custard pies and other delights. Scorecards became just a small facet of the business, yet the firm name has always been followed by the description, "Publisher and Caterer." Stevens expanded to Madison Square Garden (where Harry's son Frank used to baby-sit gangsters' guns during six-day bicycle races), Belmont Park and Saratoga. All the sons—Hal, Frank, Bill and Joe—helped out. "There's always a Stevens around," said one. "That's why we get someplace."
One place they got to was a new racetrack in Juàrez, Mexico in 1909. Hal managed the concessions and papa Harry invested $100,000 in the track itself. Juàrez was not exactly as genteel as Saratoga Springs, N.Y., especially after the Mexican Revolution started in 1911 and Pancho Villa's men frequented the neighborhood. Hal once recalled that a Villa trooper pulled a pistol on a vendor who refused to cash a printing-press $50 bill, and the firm has an old photo that shows a hole made by a U.S. cannonball in one of the two towers. People around Juàrez were understandably edgy. One night an employee decided to play a practical joke. He threw gravel on the tin roof of the Stevens office and turned off the lights. When the lights came back on, the office workers noticed Hal Stevens was missing. They found him huddled in a walk-in icebox, clutching the day's receipts. A true concessionaire to the end.
Starting with Scorecard Harry, all the Stevenses have thrived on hard work and long hours. And they have kept themselves close to the source of their profits. Frank, who took over the leadership after Harry's death, loaded soda trays at the Polo Grounds the night of the Dempsey-Firpo fight, and the tradition has persisted. Late one night at the office a few years ago, Frank and Bill were going over accounts. "We've missed one thing in this business," said Bill. "We don't have anything to do between one and 8 in the morning."
Even the post-midnight hours were busy at one Stevens branch in 1958. An 18-inch snowstorm at Bowie racetrack in Maryland marooned thousands of people for the night. The concessions manager, Raymond Hartshorn, closed down the bars but kept the food stands open, giving away 60 pies, 300 cakes, 3,100 hot dogs, 6,831 sandwiches and 8,136 cups of coffee (all paid for later by the track). People slept on dining-room tables with tablecloths for blankets. Others played dice with sugar cubes. "We managed to feed them all, but I don't know how," said Hartshorn. "We even managed to serve breakfast. Luckily, we had a large supply of bread on hand. I stayed up until 5 o'clock the next afternoon directing the operation."
Hartshorn should have been pleased with his staff's performance, but concessionaires are hard to satisfy. On his way home through the snow, he suddenly sat up straight in his car seat and got furious. "How did we have that much bread left on a Saturday?" he fumed.
Willie Cohen, a Stevens employee for 46 years, undergoes a different kind of ordeal once or twice every year. He manages the concessions at both Yonkers and Roosevelt raceways near New York City. The harness tracks use many of the same employees and much of the same equipment, and the trouble comes about because one track normally opens the night after the other closes. Last year Yonkers' second session opened July 29; Roosevelt's last race was over at 11:30 the night before. As usual, Cohen got little sleep, supervising a moving operation that included 100 cash registers, 1,000 silver coffeepots and 1,500 plate covers. An 18-ton trailer hauled some of the equipment, 3½-ton trucks made 10 other trips, and the transition went so smoothly that not one item was broken. By 6 a.m. the kitchen at Yonkers was preparing a full dinner menu.
"The only time things really become hectic is when the Kentucky Derby rolls around," says Joseph Stevens, one of Harry's grandsons. "Although it only lasts one day, it is the biggest day in the sports concession business, and we bring in 1,580 of our workers from all parts of the nation. The moment it ends we start planning for next year." Stevens won the concession rights for the Derby only five weeks before the race of May 3, 1941, and by the time the big day had arrived two new kitchens had been built, six large gas ranges installed and 1,350 employees hired, including 150 boys just to sweep up broken glass.
Before the Kentucky Derby contract went to Stevens, it was held by Sportservice Inc., a Buffalo-based company founded by the three Jacobs brothers, Marvin, Charles and Louis, who long ago established a reputation for refusing to discuss their affairs with anyone. The Derby is about the only thing the Jacobs clan has lost in decades. Sport-service is the giant of the mass-feeding industry, filling fans at 10 major league baseball stadiums and more than 70 racetracks, plus jai alai frontóns, arenas and auditoriums, not only in the U.S. but in Canada, Puerto Rico, England and Italy. An anonymous spokesman, the only kind available at Sportservice, says the firm grosses more than $50 million a year. All Lou Jacobs will say is, "We're in business to sell peanuts."
The business started with Marvin selling candy at a Buffalo theater in the early 1900s. He was soon joined by his two younger brothers, and Lou turned out to be the dynamo of the trio. He once told a friend he realized the potential of the concession game when he sold candy in a theater and made more money that year than the president of the University of Buffalo. The brothers also rented out canoes in Delaware Park and hawked peanuts in the old wooden Buffalo ball park. They were alert, upper-berth-riding penny pinchers, and they made economy pay off. When they took over the concessions for the Detroit Tigers they raised gross income in their first year to 10 times the previous year's total. They have been firmly entrenched in Michigan since the 1920s.
Detroit was the scene of one of the notable incidents in the profession's folklore—the Ducky Medwick affair in the seventh game of the 1934 World Series. Medwick, left fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, had slid into third base too hard to suit Tiger fans, and when he went out to his position he found it was raining Jacobs fruit, vegetables and pies, which suddenly had gone from 10¢ to 25¢. When the field was cleared and play was about ready to resume, the barrage from the left-field stands started again—worse than before. The Commissioner of Baseball ordered Ducky out of the game for his own safety and ordered the vendors to stop selling missiles.
Sportservice has had various interests in teams and arenas, but Lou never became a fan for fear he would get so interested in the games he would waste time that should be devoted to business. After undergoing a major operation a few years ago, he was told by doctors to spend at least six months in bed. Four days later he was propped up by a couple of pillows, juggling telephones and dictating to his secretary. A week later he was pacing the floor while dictating. Before a month had gone by he was back at his desk demanding, "How can a guy sell peanuts in bed?"
The brothers are as tenacious as they are hardworking. When George Storer bought the Miami baseball franchise in 1956 he thought the club had only a three-year contract with Sportservice, but there suddenly appeared a five-year contract with three renewal options. Storer claimed no knowledge of this deal, took his case to court and lost (some think because his chief witness died before testifying). Bill MacDonald bought the team in 1959 and he, too, vainly tried to shake Sportservice. He even offered to buy the remainder of the contract for $70,000 but was refused. Since then the club has been shifted to San Juan, P.R., Charleston, W.Va. and Atlanta, and the Jacobs brothers have followed. Now that the Milwaukee Braves are moving to Atlanta, the team must pack up again. Wherever it wanders until 1975, Sportservice will be there.
The Jacobs ambassador to Pittsburgh, Myron O'Brisky, is one of the patriarchs of peanut peddling. He was sent to Forbes Field on a temporary assignment in 1928, has been there ever since and is a hot dog psychologist of the first rank. Forbes Field once was host to an opera, and O'Brisky was worried about what kind of cuisine to offer his supposedly upper-crust audience. Finally he decided to stick with his ball-park staples. "They ate hot dogs like never before," he says. "We had a helluva night." When Roy Harney became general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, O'Brisky wanted to demonstrate the tastiness of his hot dogs, so he wolfed down eight or 10 in front of the boss. "I got sick," he said. "I mean deathly sick."
O'Brisky's chief worry is often the whimsical weather. One cold morning before a Pitt home game he ordered 800 gallons of coffee, but the sun came out at 9:30 and by 10 a.m. he was on the phone ordering ice cream by the truck-load. "It turned out to be the biggest day I ever had in ice cream at Pitt Stadium," he said.
Today, many of the ingenious old-timers of the concessions business like O'Brisky and the Jacobs brothers are beginning to give way to their computer-age sons, armed with devices that can do things like fill whole trays of soft-drink cups at once. In addition, two giant vending-machine corporations are beating on the commissary door for a share of the enormous profits. Automatic Canteen Co. of America, the epitome of big business, recently displaced Stevens at Yankee Stadium. Some said the change was made because Yankee owners at that time were also Canteen stockholders. But Patrick O'Malley, the ex-Coca-Cola executive who runs Automatic Canteen, insists it was because his firm was willing to install $1 million worth of new equipment. He failed in an attempt to acquire the Stevens corporation but succeeded in winning the contract to service the new Anaheim Stadium in California also.
ABC Consolidated Corp. (mass feeding at airports and on toll roads) is doing even better. It serviced the winter Olympics in Squaw Valley and has such lucrative contracts as the Los Angeles Coliseum, Los Angeles Sports Arena, Franklin Field, Michigan Stadium, Miami Marine Stadium and that Shangri-la of sport, the Astrodome.
One could spend a week eating and drinking in Houston's domed stadium and, though it somehow seems un-American, never sink his teeth into a hot dog. The most popular eating place there is the handsome Astrodome Club, all velvet and deep carpeting and lovely girls pushing dessert carts loaded with éclairs. Plate-glass windows provide a clear view of the field below. Last season 25 debutantes from nearby Louisiana had their coming-out party there, then adjourned to the grandstand to watch the Astros play. The menu offers a "king-size cut of succulent Roast Prime Eye of Beef" ($5.50), 14-ounce "New York Sirloin" ($7.50), and such fancies as Braised Wild Game Veronique and Lobster √† la Marini√®re. The food and the service are excellent, more often than not far superior to the baseball.
There are also the Domeskeller (beer, knackwurst and barbecued chicken), the Trailblazer Room (Texas-style stews) and the Countdown Cafeteria. But nothing beats the 80-seat Sky-dome Club, exclusively for the wealthy owners of Sky-dome boxes. On one side of the club is American food and on the other Oriental—pea pods, bamboo shoots and "Ringed Pheasant Breast Imperial." The food is prepared with chopsticks on a grill in front of the customer, and what is not placed on his plate is left on the grill so he may help himself to seconds with a silver spatula. Sitting on a combination stool-easy chair, the fragrance of jasmine tea enveloping him, a nostalgic weenie-lover might wonder what Score-card Harry would think of all this.
There are regular concession stands at the Astrodome, too, but the trend to luxury dominates, and not just in Houston. One of the poshest private restaurants today is the Stadium Club in Walter O'Malley's place, with its redwood beam ceilings and custom-made china. To Tom Arthur, ABC's manager in Los Angeles, the place is just a headache, however. A membership fee is required, so everyone arrives at once and expects immediate seating, window-side tables and low prices.
Candlestick Park in San Francisco has a Stadium Club that cost $600,000 (the ladies' powder room has woven silk on the walls) and features a $3.95 all-you-can-eat buffet catered by the Fairmont Hotel. The Hit and Run Club in Baltimore Memorial Stadium offers twin-bill sundaes, umpireburgers deluxe and a "rookie infield sandwich" (Swiss cheese). The Diamond Club in New York's Shea Stadium seats 950 people and is packed for every game (all unfilled reservations are canceled at 6:15 p.m.). The Stadium Club at Yankee Stadium was the first of its kind but is now lagging behind, at least in décor.
Racetracks still are far ahead of ball parks in high-style catering, however. Virtually every track has a fancy dining room comparable to the style-setting Cloud Casino at Roosevelt Raceway or the Turf Terrace at Saratoga. Most of these rooms and terraces lose money for the track (not for the concessionaire, of course), but the track owners are satisfied with them because they please the high-class bettors.
Despite the trend, not everyone wants to change his boyhood preferences. A wealthy Hollywood producer telephoned Tom Arthur one day from Dodger Stadium's expensive dugout-level seats. "The producer handed the phone over to a man with him," says Arthur, "and the man said, 'This is Cary Grant.' It was Cary Grant." (Into Arthur's mind came an image of the suave actor in a tuxedo seated across a candlelit table from Deborah Kerr.) "Grant said, 'I'm a stockholder in ABC and I have a complaint. You don't have enough grill space down here for the hot dogs.' We went down there and put in a big grill. All our sales went up. Cary Grant is not the only one who still likes beer and hot dogs with his baseball."
TO LEASE OR NOT TO LEASE?
Should the owners of a racetrack or ball park handle their own food and drink sales or hire outsiders? Evidence gathered in Chicago indicates the customer gets a better deal if the owners do it themselves. Wrigley Field sells hamburgers for 40¢, beer for 40¢. At Comiskey Park, handled by Illinois Sportservice, both items are a dime more. Home-operated Arlington and Washington parks have better food, service and décor than a rival track, Maywood, run by Sportservice. "This is a supporting business," says George Seelt, Arlington-Washington concession manager. "Suppose the owners lease it out; the concessionaire will try to squeeze a dime. Any track that owns its own concessions doesn't have to squeeze the dime."
TAKE THE MUSTARD, OR ELSE—
Concessionaires are not the only characters in the peanut business. There is an army of show-offs, con men and frustrated circus barkers who hawk wares in the stands. The legendary "Eppie" Epstein worked Yankee Stadium as well as the Polo Grounds, but his heart stayed with the Giants. He would bravely parade through the Yankee bleachers shouting, "Buy a scorecard, the Yankees stink." Picking up empty bottles in the stands one day he found a pair of false teeth that fitted better than his own and wore them ever after. Charlie Frank, a hot dog hustler in Philadelphia, absolutely insists that his Palestra customers take some mustard. "What am I gonna do with all that if it's left over?" he pleads with them.
THESE DOGS HAVE MIXED PEDIGREES
Frankfurter recipes differ widely from city to city, even from butcher to butcher. Some wieners are in casings, some skinless; some contain "extenders," i.e., nonfat dry milk solids or cereals; some are all beef, some are a mixture of beef and pork. Tom Arthur, ABC's Los Angeles concessionaire, boasts, "I get sworn affidavits from a bonded laboratory as to the protein content of our hot dogs." Here is what goes into a 100-pound batch of Arthur's Dodger Stadium franks: More than ninety-two pounds of meat (half beef, half pork), 3 pounds corn syrup, 2 pounds 12 ounces salt, 1 pound 8 ounces dextrose, 10 ounces flavoring that the packer refuses to divulge, ¼ ounce sodium nitrite, ‚Öû ounce sodium nitrate.
FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS
MARC SIMONT