Chock full o'Nuts

Upon graduation from Columbia University in the early Twenties, Mr. [William] Black followed the normal routine of job hunting. Unable to find employment that suited him, he went into business for himself. He opened a nut store under a staircase in the basement of a Times Square building.

From this subterranean start the venture grew into a chain of eighteen nut stores under the name Chock Full O' Nuts [sic]. The business thrived until the depression hit. Mr. Black decided nuts were a luxury. From 1931 to 1933 he changed all the stores into quick-order luncheonettes.

The restaurants specialized, as they do today, in nutted cream cheese sandwiches and coffee. Soups and pies were added to round out the menu.

George Auerbach, "Chock Full o' Whatever It Takes," New York Times, April 14, 1956

An impulsive purchase of two cans of coffee in New Jersey has had me thinking about Chock full o'Nuts.¹ Once upon a time, Chock full o'Nuts was a New York chain whose restaurants seemed to be everywhere, with glass fronts and distinctively lettered dark-blue and white signs. I remember eating at Chock full o'Nuts as a kid, on family shopping expeditions and after trips to the orthodontist — "frankfurters" (not "hot dogs"), chocolate milk, and very strange doughnuts. I remember how good mustard and chocolate milk tasted together. I remember how quickly the fun of sitting on a stool faded into the awkwardness of legs dangling in space. I remember that there was no tipping, and I remember wondering what would happen to the money if someone were to leave a tip. I remember that it seemed that everyone working at Chock full o'Nuts was black. I remember a song that my brother and I created, inspired by an item on the menu (and the song "Everybody Loves Saturday Night"):

Navy pea bean soup, navy pea bean soup,
Everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody,
Navy pea bean soup.

The Chock full o'Nuts menu was limited, but I didn't remember how limited until I found this photograph:


[Jackie Robinson and an unidentifed employee. Robinson became vice-president of personnel for Chock full o'Nuts in 1957.]

Lobster salad and coffee, please. And a piece of lemon cream pie. William Black's idea of "food" seems to have been stuck in a time warp, a severely minimalist time warp: No Coke. No Pepsi. No fries. No chips. No wonder the restaurants began disappearing in the 1970s.

Chock full o'Nuts' Chock Cafés still offer a limited menu, including the Chock Classic ("datenut bread with cream cheese") and whole wheat donuts (not doughnuts).

Whole wheat: that's why the doughnuts were so strange.

Related posts
Chock full o'Nuts lunch hour
New York, 1964: Chock full o'Nuts

Related reading and viewing
Company history
Chock full o'Nuts' last days
William Black's philanthropy

Chock full o'Nuts (1970 photograph)
Chock full o'Nuts (1970s photograph)
Chock Full o'Nuts commercial (with Page Morton Black, the boss's wife, and a shortened version of the famous jingle)

You can find more commercials in the timeline at the company website.

¹ The capitalization and spacing are wrong, but that's the company way.

The Lincoln Bedroom

It's time to turn the page:

Asked at a town hall-style meeting in Fargo, N.D., about any decorating plans for the Lincoln Bedroom, Obama described a visit to the White House after he became a U.S. senator.

"You have all these mementos of Abraham Lincoln, but you have this flat-screen TV in there," Obama told the crowd at the outdoor event.

"I thought to myself, 'Now, who stays in the Lincoln Bedroom and watches [ESPN's] 'Sports Center'? You've got your clicker. . . . That didn't seem to me to be appropriate. So I might take out the TV, I don't know.

"You should read when you're in the Lincoln Bedroom! Reread the Gettysburg Address. Don't watch TV."

Orange flag art

Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Flag on Orange Field (1957)

Sluggo’s “No”

Sluggo has no problem shirking, but for the rest of us, Ramona Creel's 20 Ways to Say No might be helpful. I am not taking on any new responsibilities. And so on. No. This Ernie Bushmiller illustration has been called "the greatest Nancy panel ever drawn."

The Wrecking Crew

The Wrecking Crew (2008, dir. Denny Tedesco) is a documentary film about the Los Angeles studio musicians heard on recordings by the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Nat King Cole, the Mamas & the Papas, the Righteous Brothers, the Ronettes, Frank Sinatra, and many others. The director is the son of guitarist and Crew member Tommy Tedesco.

The film has been shown at festivals and has a screening tonight in Los Angeles. No distribution yet.

"Books v. Cigarettes"

George Orwell calculates the cost of a reading habit in the 1946 essay "Books v. Cigarettes":

[R]eading is one of the cheaper recreations: after listening to the radio probably the cheapest.

After reading this essay, I did some rough arithmetic and found that the cost of my Proust habit has been about 25¢ per reading hour. Cheap!

"[A] process and an unfolding"

On George Eliot and human freedom:

If science could see freedom, what would it look like? If it wanted to find the will, where would it search? Eliot believed that the mind's ability to alter itself was the source of our freedom. In Middlemarch, Dorothea — a character who, like Eliot herself, never stopped changing — is reassured that the mind "is not cut in marble — it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing." Dorothea finds hope in this idea, since it means that the soul "may be rescued and healed." Like Jane Austen, a literary forebear, Eliot reserved her highest praise for characters brave enough to embrace the possibilities of change. Just as Elizabeth Bennet escapes her own prejudices, so does Dorothea recover from her early mistakes. As Eliot wrote, "we are a process and an unfolding."

Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 38

[Lehrer has misquoted. Eliot writes in Middlemarch that "character too is a process and an unfolding." Correction added February 7, 2010.]

Aronnax's Firefox themes for Mac

The Internets are filled with generous and pseudonymous people, one of whom, Aronnax, has given us GrApple, a set of four beautiful Firefox themes for Mac. I'm partial to GrApple Delicious (blue), which I think is the most beautiful browser theme I've ever seen. Yes, GrApple looks like Apple's Safari, but better. As Aronnax's page notes, GrApple looks "up to 3 times more beautiful than Safari and up to 5.5 times more beautiful than Opera 9." Thanks, Aronnax!

El cardplayers

The above image comes from 3rd Ave. El (1954), an Oscar-nominated short film by Carson Davidson. Its elements are delightful: the El, a few riders, a shiny dime, Franz Joseph Haydn's Concerto in D for Harpsichord, and "the city."

The film's credits list six actors, in what appears to be order of appearance (a photographer, a drunk, and father and child, a couple out on the town). These cardplayers though are evidently genuine commuters, caught perhaps on their way to work.

I found 3rd Ave. El as an extra on the DVD release of The Shvitz (1993, dir. Jonathan Berman), a documentary about old-school steambaths. (Shvitz is Yiddish for "sweat.") But you can also watch 3rd Ave. El online, via the Internet Archive.

Black Pearl eraser

In eraserdom, black is the new pink.

Latex- and PVC-free, the Black Pearl eraser looks great and plays well with pencils. The package says that this eraser "fits comfortably" in the hand, but I wouldn't know — I hold it with my fingers. I paid $1.47 for two (a his 'n' hers set).

[Update, August 16, 2008: These erasers are difficult to find. Paper Mate says that the Black Pearl is in production and can be ordered from S.P. Richards, 1-800-442-7774.]