We sat with Bob and Connie Atkins. Bob was a surgeon (Dr. Atkins) who finished his studies just as war broke out, which meant he started his 50+ year career as an Army doctor. He was kind but reserved, and too cool to be eager, giving plenty of time to answer my questions, sometimes so much that he'd never answer at all. Sparse comments trickled out in his soft-spoken, warbled voice, verging on tipsy sounding. His wife Connie was far gone with dementia. She had beady eyes and chubby cheeks that maintained optimum chubbiness by her smile as she'd recite seemingly the sole memory she had left, one about her grandkids pretending to be operated on by their grandpa, as I pictured, out of a kind of 1950s nuclear family reverence for the patriarch, giving their grandfather a chance to demonstrate his knowledge. Dr. Atkins looked on her with not a trace of impatience or embarrassment, although I knew he was also keeping track of her repetition. He added new details to each repeated anecdote.
On perhaps her fourth recitation, when she started "Do you know what the kids used to do?" I restrained myself from saying "Yes" and instead said to her husband, "Sounds like that's her favorite story," to which he, while remaining totally motionless, closed his eyes in response. I thought to myself, That is an offbeat but surprisingly effective way of responding to someone you don't give a shit about, something I hadn't ever seen before or tried myself. I made a mental note to do so someday, for when I want to convey "That's enough." Or maybe he closed his eyes in response to the arrival of my Jello, which was the Sunshine Salad. He opened his eyes eventually and it was at this time that he chose to tell me that he was specifically a stomach surgeon through the war. He later added that he operated on the famous baseball player Ty Cobb, who apparently made most of his money not through celebrity but through Coca Cola stocks and eventually ruined himself in retirement with alcoholism. Dr. Atkins operated on Cobb at this later stage, when he was all bloated and unhealthy. It was a long story made longer by interjections of his wife's repeated anecdote, with a punchline that was something like, "And I bet I am the only one who can say 'I shot Ty Cobb in the butt!'"
This article gives a brief history of the post-war Jello craze, and touches on the maddeningly obvious co-optation with other empirical US brands (as seen in the pictures, note the Kraft and Philadelphia etc.); this website, one from a Jello Museum in upstate New York, provides a concise yet thorough history of Jello's beginnings as well as several recipes taken from books with titles like "Bright Spots For Wartime Meals - 66 Ration-Wise Recipes 1944." Take note of the interesting TRIVA on the side.
Anyway for the rest of the evening I trapped myself in an internet investigation into the history of Jello and looked at images of old recipes, all of which look like the cooking of a housewife on the brink of a barbiturates breakdown. That housewife would have been me---the one who nobody would really speak to anymore except in careful cooing tones, the one who out of unspeakable anxiety over everything wrong with her life would spend all day while the kids were at school and husband at work in an apron, listening to Lawrence Welk and encasing the entire house in gelatin. The sofa, knives, transistor radio, the husband's shoe horn; Toby, the family border collie.
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This article gives a brief history of the post-war Jello craze, and touches on the maddeningly obvious co-optation with other empirical US brands (as seen in the pictures, note the Kraft and Philadelphia etc.); this website, one from a Jello Museum in upstate New York, provides a concise yet thorough history of Jello's beginnings as well as several recipes taken from books with titles like "Bright Spots For Wartime Meals - 66 Ration-Wise Recipes 1944." Take note of the interesting TRIVA on the side.
