Dave Wood

I’ll never forget 1945, the glorious year that my grandma went off to war and returned with vittles that lasted for months. Some folks remember 1945 as the year World War II ended. In Grandma’s household we will forever remember it as The Year of The Spam.

It all began when Grandma made her wintry walk home from the hospital after folding bandages for the troops Over There. She crossed the railroad tracks, paused momentarily, looked down quizzically, then headed for our house on Scranton Street in a long-gaited dead run. She fussed and fidgeted until darkness fell, then said “Quick, Davey. Get your sled. There’s a whole case of Spam that fell off the supply train headed for Winona when it came through this afternoon.”

We trudged through the snow toward the tracks, Grandma shushing me all the way, fearful of being caught in the treasonous act of depriving a hungry soldier Over There or a Hungry Soldier On his way back from Over There. But the meat rationing tokens in the cupboard were sadly depleted and now she had me, a growing boy who couldn’t live on bacon grease and Karo Syrup alone—Grandma’s version of what I grew up to call “Norwegian Guacamole.”

The huge wooden crate of khaki colored Spam cans had landed askew at trackside. We lifted it onto my American Flyer, then tugged and jerked it back to house, wrestled our contraband into the barn with no help from Grandpa, who wanted nothing to do with our treacherous thievery.  OR the Spam.

But Grandma wore the spatula in the family and Grandpa couldn’t avoid three squares –in this case oblongs. We feasted on Spam ‘n Eggs for breakfast. We patted tummies with lunches of ground Spam ‘n pickles. Dinner? Spam ala Beurre, with sauce moutarde. Week in and week out grandma dealt us slices of Spam with the deftness of a riverboat card shark. Grandpa? He got pale and bilious and muttered under his breath the need to sink his dentures “into a slab of real meat.”

But Grandma was raised on a farm and thought anything “boughten” was superior to anything made from scratch. She preferred Hostess HoHos to Aunt Doree’s chocolate cake. (She once served canned ChunKing Chow Mein for Thanksgiving dinner!) Gram’s ability to create permutations on the innocent cans of pink stuff was wondrous. It climaxed—at least I thought it climaxed—when she dipped slices in beaten egg and fried them in butter. After that one Grandpa retreated to the fruit cellar for a long pull off a Mason jar of Grandma’s home-made beet wine.

Finally the Spam ran out, as did the might of the Land of The Rising Sun, and our family resumed the mastication of solid hunks of meat, as we waited for Uncle Mike, who had been promoted to General to return from the Philippines. Uncle Mike arrived, loaded down with Samurai, expensive cameras, kimonos, Japanese firearms. It was Saturday and Grandpa was out on the porch to greet Mike with another Mason jar of wine, this time, Dandelion, Grandpa having depleted the beet variety. Grandma was nowhere to be seen, busy putting the finishing touches on a meal specially planned to please the homecomer. That would be a pot roast thought I, but the farm girl proudly announced as the men came in for dinner: “I saved three cans against the day you’d get home, Mike, and look how I doctored them up.”

The Spams sat there in a row like three little ground pigs. Each was scored like a ham, with cloves at each intersection, then glazed with pineapple syrup.

Uncle Mike’s eyeballs were probably glazed as well, as he ceremoniously dug into the little piglets he had ingested every day in mess halls from Milwaukee to Manila. At least there’d be some Dandelion wine left to wash it down afterwards.

I relished those creative dinners Grandma came up with and loved every Spam rendition she concocted. But as Ruth and I have taken to eaten more ready-to-serve meals in our old age, I can certainly sympathize with anyone who can hardly look at another piece of Spam!