Storytelling | Culture | Humor
On Paper Towels and Lawrence Welk
I promise I’m not making any of this up…
As I say at the beginning of most of these stories, I promise I’m not making any of this up…
Growing up in the 70’s I always thought my family was pretty normal. We did have a few interesting rituals thought.
Especially our Friday night dinner out and paper towel ritual.
It began with dinner out, which was nice.
What I remember is going to the same restaurant week after week after week after week. They knew us by name.
Then we would switch and go to a different restaurant, week after week after week after week. They then knew us by name too.
I never did discover the mechanism by which we changed restaurants.
And we only did it on Friday nights. Not on weeknights. Friday night.
I remember being 10 and hearing a friend talk about eating out on a Tuesday and I asked:
“You mean the restaurants are open then?!?”
After dinner we would take my Mom, who never learned how to drive, to the grocery store to do the shopping for the week.
On the way, we would stop at whatever store my Dad has identified as having the very best sale that week on paper towels.
Usually 4 for a $1.
Limit 4 per customer.
So each of us, Dad, Mom, sister, and me, would go into the store with our dollar, and then find our 4 paper towel rolls. Of course, we each had to go to separate registers so they would not know what we were doing.
And then we’d report back to our station wagon (wood paneled) with our 16 paper towel rolls.
The reason for all the paper towels
According to my Dad, I was the reason for all the paper towels.
As my Nana was fond of saying:
“Jeff, you don’t wash your car. You bathe it.”
I had a black vinyl over royal blue ’68 Mustang so she was probably right.
And I would use rolls and rolls of paper towels to clean the chrome and glass.
This really bothered my Nana, who remembered the Great Depression.
Nana would dig my used paper towels out of the trash, wash them, and then hang them out to dry to reuse.
It bothered her even more that I refused to use used paper towels on my Mustang.
My teenage attitude was:
“For 10 years I’ve spent every Friday night going into TG&Y to buy 4 rolls of paper towels. I’ve earned this!”
But Saturday Night is Coming
Lest you think my young weekends were completely horrible, we could always look forward to Saturday night.
After a day of working in the yard (inside 1 acre corner lot, which my parents bought as a house surrounded by dirt and weeds) these 3 things would happen, in order, without fail:
- Some type of Hamburger Helper meal: Hamburger Helper had just come out, and it was all the rage.
- The Lawrence Welk Show: bet you didn’t know that show ran almost 30 years, from 1951–1982, did ya? 1,065 shows. And we watched every one of them…
- Hee Haw: slightly better, but still…
And you wonder why I bathed my car? That car and a driver’s license was my ticket out of “The Herring Family Saturday Night Dysfunction.”
Years Later
Years later in late high school and then college, after working, dates, beach trips, and other shenanigans, all my friends would gather at my parent’s house or another family’s house by 11:30 pm to watch this new live show called “Saturday Night Live.”
It was a bit different from Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw.
One night my Dad stayed up to watch it with my girlfriend, me, and a few buddies.
Right after Weekend Update, my Dad pops out with:
Dad: “This is so much different and better than Lawrence Welk!”
Me: “You got that right Dad!”
