Wieners, frankfurters, franks, weenies, dogs, pups, red hots…
Out with the hat and gloves, out with frosted-over windshields and early sunsets. In with sprinklers and flowers, bathing suits and, if lucky, get-away vacations. For many, we’re in the middle of the best season of all, and yet…
An early July Oracle Happiness Report revealed that 45% of us “have not felt true happiness since early 2020,” and 25% “don’t know or have forgotten what it means to be truly happy.”
And this morning’s USA Today Snapshot of an AP-NORC poll shows that just 14% of us think America is headed in the right direction vs. a whopping 85% who say it isn’t, so, instead of sharing education news today, I’m going with summer’s all-time one-handed wonder, the hot dog. July, is, after all, National Hot Dog Month, so think you should know that:
- While sausages reportedly hark back to 700 BCE, credit goes to German immigrants who sold their “dachshund sausages” out of a food cart in the 1860s in New York City.
- It’s said that, around 1879, German immigrant Charles Feltman opened the first hot dog stand in Coney Island and sold some 3,600 of them!
- When a St. Louis vendor ran out of white gloves to help folks hold their hot sausages, he stuck them in white buns.
- By 1883, baseball games and hot dogs were the perfect pairing and still are…
And that’s just for starters:
- Story has it that, at a baseball game at New York’s Polo Grounds, cartoonist Tad Dorgan heard vendors shouting, “Get your red-hot dachshund sausages.” In turn, he reportedly drew a dachshund dog in a bun, but, unable to spell dachshund, he called them “hot dogs.”
- Disney’s Mickey Mouse’s first spoken words were “hot dogs” in the cartoon The Carnival Kid.
- Americans gobble up some $2 billion dollars’ worth of hot dogs every year.
- Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, we devour about 7 billion hot dogs!
- The average American eats 70 hot dogs a year!
- Nathan’s 2022 Hot Dog Eating Contest winner, Joey Chestnut, downed 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes—that’s 7.6 franks every minute for a total of 22,040 calories and 60,040 mg of sodium!
Oh, yes, the toppings…
A recent online Harris Poll found that mustard is #1, with 71% of the vote. Then come:
#2. ketchup (52%)
#3. onions (47%)
#4. chili (45%)
#5. relish (41%)
Ketchup?? Really?? But, if that brings you a measure of good cheer, that’s good enough for me this summer of our discontent, 2022. Grab a cold one and enjoy.
~ With thanks, Carol
What a fun article. Thanks!
Thank you! Thank you!
Love reading your newsletters ❤️
So informative and interesting
I can’t thank you enough for reading me, responding to me. Am so grateful.