HUMOR: The Dog Days of Summer
Drew pines over the end of hot dog season.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
Email Martin
This weekend we celebrate Labor Day. More specifically, we celebrate the coal miners and railroad men who gave their lives and fingers so that we could enjoy eating hot dogs and Amish potato salad not made by Amish with all of our digits intact and without the burden of pausing periodically to hack up pieces of our blackened lungs. It’s essentially St. Patrick’s Day on the first Monday in September.
Culturally, we have figured out other ways to die prematurely, and Labor Day weekend is the second deadliest time of the year to die in roadway accidents behind only Memorial Day weekend. Labor Day is also the deadliest time of year to choke and die on a hot dog. Though the National Highway Traffic Administration does not offer statistics on hot dog choking deaths, it is safe to presume that since Labor Day is the official last day of hot dog eating season, there are people scarfing that extra dog because the thought of waiting until May for their next dose of emulsified meat trimmings is a leading cause of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
You may not have known that there was an official end to hot dog eating season, but the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (which you also probably did not know existed) notes that most hot dogs are consumed between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. On some level, this seems inconsistent because I assumed that ketchup and mustard were more of a hazard while wearing white during the summer months, but apparently apparel choice is not a deciding factor in when hot dogs and sausages are consumed.
At the end of each summer, I listen to a song by The Kinks titled “Summer’s Gone”: “When I think of what we wasted, it makes me sad. We never appreciated what we had. Now I’m standing in the doorway with an overcoat on and it really feels like summer’s gone.”
The song continues: “I was riding in the car with my Mom and Dad, He was driving the car, the kids were driving him mad, Dad looked at us and then he looked at his wife, he must’ve wondered where we all came from, and then Mom said: ‘Dad, you know it won’t last for long, before you know it summer’s gone.’”
The song exemplifies the genius of Kinks’ frontman Ray Davies—“He was driving the car, the kids were driving him mad” might get you a C+ in Poetry 101, but spin it into a song lyric and you get to sing at the closing ceremonies of the Olympics...although with the IOC qualifier that you will not be singing that depressing as hell song—but also causes me to reflect upon and miss summer when it is gone. And now I find that I am wistfully reflecting upon hot dogs which I did not know ended with summer until now.
I assume that my first hot dog was consumed at a long-ago baseball game because in the mid-1970s the hot dog options were generally limited to sporting venues. Growing up, we did not have microwaves to hasten the process, and ovens were the domain of casseroles and Shrinky Dinks. Despite the hot dog’s lack of availability, its significance reverberated through my early life.
We interrupt this column for a Donnie Johnston-esque moment to reflect on the world we grew up in which was obviously different than the world today: I worked for a newspaper in Reading, Pennsylvania, when I was on college breaks and that included my summers which were spent mostly in the sports department at night between 5 and midnight. A lot of my work in the sports department was the very definition of tedium with answering phones and writing down bowling and wrestling scores which were very important in Berks County along with hex signs on old barns. (To underscore the importance of wrestling, my high school had wrestling cheerleaders, and one of them once ended our relationship with a very public making out at a football game with the opposing team’s quarterback. In fairness, he was a high school quarterback, and I was a soccer goalie who allowed seven goals in a game to a single player which is still a County record—this brings the sepia-toned Donnie Johnston interlude to a very abrupt end.)
Occasionally the local minor league baseball team, the Reading Phillies (an institution that once paid me $5/game to work as a substitute batboy because I was 12 and had not unionized), played doubleheaders in the summer, and I was sent to Municipal Stadium between games to get the box score from the first game so we could make deadline and get the first game in the morning edition. More important than the box score though was getting hot dogs to share with the sports department upon my return. I would take orders, collect the money, then drive to the stadium, get the box score from the beat writer and then order a bunch of hot dogs to take back to the office for all to enjoy. I soon realized that I could have forgotten the box score but not the hot dogs.
This was a precursor to my role as Assistant Director of Media Relations for the Prince William Cannons minor league baseball team a few years later. My duties were many and all of them were unpaid. I would write articles for the game-day program, keep the whiteboard stats up to date in the main concourse, and buy marijuana for some of the players before road trips (my roles were ever evolving and, to reiterate, unpaid). I was also supposed to keep the press box tidy and get food for the assembled scribes during the game. This was an important role because the writers almost always wanted chicken sandwiches instead of hot dogs, but chicken was more expensive so if the Cannon beat writers had written something unflattering about the team, the Director of Media Relations would call me on my walkie talkie and say: “No chicken tonight.” As William Congreve famously wrote two centuries before baseball existed: “Nor hell a fury like a Class A baseball team scorned.”
So on this Labor Day weekend, remember the men, women, and children who toiled in coal mines and unpaid minor league baseball internships so we could all be paid fair wages for an honest day’s labor. Summer may be gone, but we can dream of the summers and adventures that lie ahead as we bask in summer’s last warm embrace while savoring a hot dog, slowly, so we do not become another tragic statistic in hot dog choking incidents.
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