“It’s toasted”

I thought once again of the OK Bookshop, my introduction to the world of supplies, and I wondered how many businesses might have made use of “OK” in their names. The 1940 New York City telephone directories suggest that the answer is “really many.” My favorite: the O.K. Knee Pants Company, 162 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. There’s no photograph of any interest to go with that address. But there is a good photograph for the O & K Toasted Sandwich Shop. Click for a much larger view:

[O & K Toasted Sandwich Shop, 103 Graham Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections.]

Today Quiznos proclaims itself “the original toasted sub,” but long ago the O & K Toasted Sandwich Shop (EVergreen 8–0432) knew that “toasted” is a selling point for sandwiches. Brooklyn Newsstand has items of interest from the 1920s and ’30s about four other toasted sandwich shops in the borough. A warm, toasted sandwich freshly made in a luncheonette must have been a welcome alternative to a cold, damp sandwich wrapped in wax paper and carried to work in a paper bag.

The 1940 Queens telephone directory lists another O & K Sandwich Shop — no “Toasted” — at 54-37 Myrtle Avenue (EVergreen 2–9577). Its tax photograph shows windows that appear soaped over. Was this shop ready to open? Had it already packed up and moved to Brooklyn? I have no idea.

I chose this photograph for its everyday beauty, but as I know too well, there is always a rabbit hole. Notice the truck: Uddo & Taormina (another ampersand!). Giuseppe Uddo and Giuseppe Taormina created the Progresso brand, but that’s another story.

Today 103 Graham Avenue still houses an ampersand, in the name of Happy Garden Chinese Food & Teriyaki. Happy Garden also serves french fries, onion rings, and mozzarella sticks. Brooklyn’s in the house. A mixed-use tower is going up and around 54-37 Myrtle Avenue.

*

December 9: An indefatigable reader reports that both O & K shops were owned by Yoshio Mita and Uicha Tashima. Their names and the shop addresses appear in Decisions and Orders of the New York State Labor Relations Board (1940).

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives : An O.K. Knee Pants advertisement

[“It’s toasted” is the long-standing slogan for Lucky Strike cigarettes.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg. His last (November 12) was both a doozy and a lulu. This one was about a third as difficult for me (thirteen minutes, not thirty-seven). My biggest difficulty: three confounding clues in the southeast: 30-D, ten letters, “St. Michael's, after renovation”; 56-A, five letters, “Successor of GM in the DJIA (2009)”; and 65-A, four letters, “’90s combatant in the console wars.” But I just realized what 30-D is about while typing out the clue.

Some other clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, four letters, “Problems for young pupils” and 1-D, five letters, “Hulking, these days.” These two made for an easy start.

4-D, ten letters, “Seasonal refresher.” Nice.

9-A, five letters, “Nobody you know, these days.” The answer is just, like, some word.

9-D, seven letters and 53-A, seven letters, “Where the current goes out.” I like the repurposing.

31-D, five letters, “Crook or crew.” Alliterative and clever.

40-A, five letters, “Another ’70s nickname for ‘Schwartzy.’” I didn’t know that “Schwartzy” was a nickname.

44-A, twelve letters, “Early artistic leaf.” I would like to see more such leaves.

49-A, seven letters, “Do something fatherly.” Groan.

51-D, five letters, “Work for a movie.” A conversation with Elaine today helped me see the answer right away.

58-A, nine letters, “Signoff favored by Stan Lee.” Just fun.

My favorite in this puzzle: 33-D, nine letters, “With a markup.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Lear, window treatments, pie

I was teaching King Lear and running into difficulty trying to find the play in a Complete Works. So I went off on a tangent about the importance of looking up unfamilar words. I had given the students a paragraph about dorp, and almost no one had looked up the word. “Dorp is a plant,” I said. The point of the assignment was to look up dorp, because without knowing what the word means, you couldn’t understand the paragraph.

We had already run ten minutes over, and I now tried to figure out act and scene numbers to assign the next chunk of Lear. But I couldn’t.

I stopped in the department office on my way back to my office, and a colleague handed me a pink while-you-were-out message. A local group of progressives had called, wanting to talk to my son. I explained to my colleague that my son had said that he didn’t want to be paraded around as a model student.

I walked to my office, which I was sharing with a colleague. I said hello, and she replied from her side of a partition. She had a rolling desk chair, which she had bought or requisitioned after attending a faculty orientation about office furniture. “Now I know what kind of chair I need,” she said.

In the hallway, someone walked by and asked where window treatments could be found. I suggested walking to the end of the hallway. “You’re headed in the right direction,” I said. “And now I know that procrastination is a bad habit,” my colleague added from her side of the partition.

I knew I should prepare for my next class, also on Lear, but instead I went out to a basement hallway with a low ceiling to offer apple pie or Nesselrode pie to new faculty. This activity would count as “service.” “Can I talk to you for a minute about one of your colleagues?” the dean asked. She sounded worried.

This is the twenty-fifth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has gone wrong.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[Possible sources: Thinking and talking about the podcast series Sold a Story: phonics, meaning, and so-called context clues. Talking about the Atlantic article “The Writing Revolution,” about changes in curriculum at Staten Island’s New Dorp High School. Waiting at a light next to a truck with an enormous window strapped to its side. One of the titles in the Complete Works: Ever Wherever.]

In the Appellation Mountains

Margarine is served for dessert in the Appellation Mountains, a region ravaged by the Cupertino effect. In other regions, the dessert is called meringue.

See also “anchor performance,” “pizza bread,“ and “pneumonic devices.”

ooh.directory

A directory of blogs: ooh.directory.

Recently updated

Nick Demaio and the Eldorado Now with photographs from a wedding party’s visit to the El D, not long before the bar was demolished.

WRONG

Slate has a bit of clickbait. If you must follow through, it’s here: “The New Wordle Editor Is Ruining Wordle.” Therein, Lizzie O’Leary contends that Wordle is being ruined with puns: MEDAL on Veterans Day, DRIVE on the day before Thanksgiving, FEAST on Thanksgiving itself. “No more puns,” she asks.

But O’Leary is WRONG (another five-letter word). Those are not puns. They’re not even wordplay. They are, let’s say, topical references, or topical answers.

On Thanksgiving, I deliberately guessed BEAST, solving in four or five instead of three or four because I thought that FEAST was too obvious an answer. I, too, was WRONG, or RIGHT.

Blogger undelete

Good news: Blogger now allows a user to undelete deleted published posts. Deleted drafts, though, cannot be recovered. They just disappear.

[I once unwittingly deleted an OCA post that I wrote in MarsEdit. I didn’t know that deleting it from MarsEdit (tidying up) would remove it from my blog. Yikes. Fortunately, I had a copy of the post via a Blogger e-mail subscription, a service Google recently discontinued.]

Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)

The poet Bernadette Mayer has died at the age of seventy-seven. Artforum has an obituary.

From “‘well when you begin a poem,’” in Another Smashed Pinecone (United Artists Books, 1998):

& honestly I’ve been nowhere
but here
in the space of many colors
looking for a place
ideally and in no wise
for impossible travels and knowledge
to be enjoyed and gained
in this my age
I’m embarrassed to be in

And from “Experiments,” a collaboration by Mayer and members of the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project Writing Workshop, 1971–1975, in In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1986):

Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous.

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December 5: The New York Times has an obituary.

Related reading
Bernadette Mayer’s website : Several early publications in facsimile

[The sentence from “Experiments” may not be by Mayer.]

“But first”

The Atlantic offers a six-days-a-week newsletter. Each one begins with a paragraph or two about some topic. And then, before any further development: “But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.” Or “But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic.”

Of course the newsletter’s makers do not expect the reader to read each unrelated item and then return to the subject at hand. Rather, they’re looking to direct the reader’s attention to anything that might attract it. I am writing about some topic. But first, here’s some other topic, and another, and one more. Shiny topics! That’s a sorry way to think about readerly attention.

But first, a word from our sponsor.