Reliance Cafe and rolls

Lyman County, South Dakota's Genealogy

 Spending one’s childhood at the Reliance cafe or tavern

 07/06/2006
 


    Breakfast rolls. I love them. You know, the kind with globs of cherry, apple or pineapple jelly in the center. Donna Kentch treated us in the office the other day to rolls and a flood of memories came rushing back.

 

When we lived in the Stallman Café in Reliance (west side of Main Street – built by Tom Bashara in early 1900), the Old Home Bread man (Sonny Doran) delivered these wonderful rolls to us. Sunday mornings after church the café came alive with people coming for breakfast rolls. To get the full benefit, one had to dunk these rolls in ice cold milk. Where, you might ask, is this going? Beats me, but Reliance memories linger.

 

 I spent a lot of time at the Reliance Tavern , in the back of the room with Juanita Karasek’s ever-watchful eyes on me. She kept me busy playing cards or with jigsaw and crossword puzzles. My interest in words started in that tavern.  It was also about that time that I started my food career, of sorts.  We were busy on a jigsaw puzzle one night when I remembered I had put eggs on to boil and jumped up and announced to the world I had to get home, my eggs were probably sterilized! If nothing else, it was good for a laugh at my expense, but how could I have known I meant to say petrified, which was not necessarily the right word, but the one I meant to use.

 

I was a mean picnic fixer. I’d whip up egg salad and open a can or pork and beans for sandwiches then take the little ones, Pegge, Sandy and Eddie, clear across the street for a picnic under the tree behind the tavern and next to the “haunted house”. It was a cool, breezy place for a picnic and exciting to be near that house and still be within sight of the café in case the house came to life and we had to run for ours.

 

I thought I lived in the town where Porky Pig and Brer Rabbit’s mother lived! I loved to go visit them. To me, Grandma Parkening looked like Brer Rabbit’s mother as I envisioned her out in her garden. Then on the other side of town lived Porky Pig … aka Peter Wardenberg. He was this wonderful little fat man who lived in a big eerie two-story building and could always be found sitting on his chair or bench in front of his house under a huge cottonwood tree. I never knew Mrs. Wardenberg.

 

       On down the road from Porky lived a man named Soliel “Solie” Howard who lived in a tiny tar-paper shack. He was always a curiosity to me; never bothered a soul and could always be found at Hickey’s café or walking to and from his house. Speaking of Hickey’s Café … don’t we all remember Bert and ice cream cones? What memories that conjures up! He, with his pant legs pulled up over his knees, and his spittoon on the floor between his feet.  I always though he did it because his little legs were hot.  Maybe Ivah made him do that to keep the “tobbacky” off his pant legs. We will never know.

 

And Arlo McIntyre … who was he and where did he come from? Him and his “flashing” Copenhagen  can lid as he walked the streets and attempted to maintain law and order on the streets of Reliance. I visited his mother a few times, but there always seemed to be a  sadness in that house, but I was too young to understand.

 

Get six people together to talk about a given situation and you will have six different versions. Having said that, these tidbits are as I remember them from my pre-pubescent years.

 

Meanwhile, back at the breakfast rolls. I wonder if I have a second one if anyone will notice. Or should I go hide in the bathroom like my kids did when they were small, but is that really a good place to eat? I’ll have to give that a little more thought!

 

Have a good week and go have a nice jelly-filed roll. It’ll put a smile on your face.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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This page last revised Sunday July 09, 2006 11:37 PM