Blue Plate Lunch (1940)

Sounds like mighty fine eatin' to me!

Click to enlarge.

Photograph of a truck stop café in Washington, D. C., taken by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration, June 1940.  See full-size photo at Shorpy

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A Queen is Born

Postcard depiction of the Royal Mail Ship Queen Elizabeth

A charming little film from circa 1946 about the launch and early career of RMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest ship in the world when she was built:



I've never sailed on any ship, but I would love to have done so in the era when Britannia still ruled the waves. My father along with thousands of other G.I.'s returned from the war aboard the Queen Elizabeth, and somewhere among my things are a ship's newspaper and a metal candy tin with a cover very much like the picture at the top of this post, which my mother later used as a sewing box. Long gone, though, are the several hundred dollars he won off his buddies, playing craps all the way across the North Atlantic!

I also came across these Cunard menus and a cover - click to enlarge:

Menu cover, 1957, depicting two old English seadogs meeting in some exotic foreign port - Raleigh and Drake, perhaps?

Breakfast menu, 1950 - but who eats onion soup and cold ox tongue for breakfast?

Dinner menu, 1955 - by the way, the five-shilling bottles of wine
would be equivalent to about $8.65 today - believe it or not.
I wonder how big they were.

If you're interested, here's Part 3 of a documentary about the Cunard liners and others of the era, with some interviews of folks who were instrumental in their construction or operation - you can watch the whole 4 episodes on YouTube:

What It Was Like: Menus

Last night my truckbuddy Frank made me totally bummed out and hungry with a menu he posted from some Italian place in 1962.  I wonder if I can pay him back with this cafe breakfast menu from the same general period.  Click to enlarge, and dig the prices . . .