Sunset At Dick's -- Chevys, Fords - And Basic Burgers For 19 Cents

Northwest Life: Sunday, April 11, 1999
Nostalgia
Roger George

It's always the golden hour at Dick's Drive In, that moment just before sunset that photographers cherish. For me, the background music is always the Beach Boys, and the cars are colored candy-apple red and midnight metalflake blue. Chevys and Fords; I don't remember Toyotas.

There are only five Dick's. The one I remember best, in Wallingford, sits at the bottom of an asphalt bowl. Cars fan uncomfortably around it, squeezing a semicircle around a rectangular front. Between the sidewalk and the chromium service counter stretches a waist-high band of tile in the colors of the '50s: beige, pink, robin's-egg blue.

The sign that revolves out front (that kind of '60s "I Love Lucy" orange) used to proclaim that the burgers were 19 cents; they're more now, but still as basic as they can get: a glob of ketchup, a smear of mayo and a dollop of mustard, with a fried patty - that's it. This is from an era when they taught us that red meat was an excellent source of protein.

But the real attraction is the fries. As a kid, I was amazed to find that people would actually make a product and leave the skin on - peeling things was real big in the '50s. Dick's used real potatoes, not reprocessed mush, and they managed to produce the Platonic form of the fry. They use vegetable oil these days, but the fries still drip and crinkle and crunch.

I could owe my life to Dick's and fatty hamburgers. At the end of high school I was a severely undernourished kid, only 130 pounds,

and as lonely as any outcast teenager has ever felt. I'd ride my Honda 90 to Dick's at midnight and wolf down cheeseburgers and fries, gaining weight and, at the same time, being part of an "American Graffiti" community.

I wasn't the only one, apparently, who felt this way; my 30-year high school reunion began with an informal pilgrimage to Dick's. For many of us who grew up in a certain time and place, who shared overlapping experiences, a visit to Dick's, to this day, launches a complex of associations and emotions.

We don't see or smell or taste the "real" Dick's, but rather something we're creating on the spot. I may be sitting in a Honda Civic, but I'm still smelling the hot oil from that ancient Honda 90.

Recently, I mentioned Dick's to a couple of acquaintances. We have no personal shared history. Yet the idea of Dick's launched a stream of reminiscences. Each of us described experiences - shopping at defunct stores on Broadway and having lunch at Dick's, packing into teen cars late at night on Wallingford, sipping shakes on Holman Road after a visit to the beach at Golden Gardens . . . We all nodded in recognition as each recalled an experience, and I'm pretty sure we all created pretty much the same mental images.

I'm equally sure that, in those images, it is always the golden hour.

------------------------------- Roger George is an Enlish instructor at Bellevue Community College and chairman of the communications department. He lives in Kirkland with his wife and two children.

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