Hackensack, NJ Community Message Boards

On a lighter note...
I found these three remarks posted on a comment chain online, although these are not my own comments, each touches my own sweet memories. I wanted to share them, but I do not know how to create a link to there, so I thought maybe some board readers might want to add some  personal notes on "food" nostalgia on this thread...

Here are three I am sharing that were part of Hackensack's past....
 
#1

I turned 60 this year and spent my childhood years in Bergen County, New Jersey during the 1950s and '60s. There were several ice cream trucks that came around in summer, including the Good Humor man. Those little white trucks had bells mounted above the windshields which the driver operated by pulling a string. None of today's annoying music blasting over loudspeakers! The ice cream bars were kept in freezers in the back of the truck and the driver opened these really thick doors and had to reach way in to get your Popsicle or chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar. (All 10 cents.) There were hardly any chain "fast food" places unless you counted Dairy Queens, which in those days had only soft ice cream, served at walk-up windows. My friends and I went to a soda fountain in either a drug store or Mom and Pop candy store to get Cokes for either 5 or 10 cents, made by squirting Coke syrup into a paper, cone-shaped cup held by a stainless steel holder, then they would fill the cup with seltzer and stir it up with a spoon. We kids earned our spending money by bringing soda bottles back to the sore for a 2-cent deposit on small bottles and 10 cents on the large. If we were lucky enough to find a quart-sized beer bottle, we could return it to the liquor store for 10 cents! Ice cream sodas and milk shakes were 25 cents and a malted was 30 cents. They would give you the stainless steel mixer cup and it would fill a standard sized Coca Cola glass about three times. Ice cream cones were ten cents.
The local lunch counters cooked their hamburgers on the grill but sometimes my grandfather would take me to a highway place called Sandy's Charcoal Hearth for a really good char-broiled burger. Naturally, after tasting these, I was completely unimpressed with the McDonald's variety, which I first tried around 1965 when fast food places started invading Bergen County, much to the chagrin of the older residents who appreciated much better food — and service.

#2

They had a chain called Dugan's "Bakers for the Home" in the NY metro area and their trucks would visit your neighborhood two or three times a week. They carried Entenmann's-quality baked goods. Milk men? Of course! We had a metal milk box and the milk man would bring us four quarts of milk every other day. (Five kids in the family.) My Mom also bought more milk during her weekly shopping trip, which sold for around 25 cents a quart.

#3

I was lucky living in Hackensack, New Jersey up until 1958 because we were within walking distance of what many people consider to be one of the finest bakeries on Earth. The B&W (Boehringer & Weimer) bakery. Their specialty was the real New Jersey-style crumb cakes, where the cake is about an inch high and the crumbs on top are thicker than the cake! They also sold very good 7-layer and Neapolitan cakes with butter cream icing so rich it tasted like chocolate or vanilla flavored butter! Their brownies, with chocolate icing and walnuts, were only 8 cents apiece!