OCR Text |
Show A COMIC STRIP in the Trib- . une this week reminds me of one of the most trying events of my life. In retrospect, it's funny. At the time, it was anything any-thing but. This comic strip has a couple of young fellows completely out of food in their apartment. They're hungry. A girl friend comes in with a doggy bag, feeds the dog a huge chunk of delicious steak left over from her cafe dinner. The guys drool and faint away. Well, it happened to me, too. Almost 17 years ago I came to Utah by train to spend the week end looking over these newspaper news-paper properties. I was well dined and wined and sent on my way back to Omaha pondering a hundred angles. SOMEHOW the budget lost its track. Somewhere there had to be another ten-dollar bill. But there wasn't. There was enough for coffee plus a dollar and loose change, and that would pay the taxi fare from the U.P. station to the house. No tip. Hundreds of miles, and many hours, raced past and I was hungry and getting hungrier, nursing my coffee and dirty looks from the waiter in the dining car. Big trouble was, all around me people were eating. A bunch of servicemen just back from Korea were hitting it up in the bar, and five or six came into the dining car and ordered steaks. At the table right next to mine, yet. ONE OF THE servicemen had imbibed much too freely. He took one bite out of a huge, succulent, pink-inside, aromatic, arom-atic, juicy T-bone steak and then left the table hurriedly. And there was his steak. Two feet away. Still smoking. One little wedge cut out. Putting out slavering, drooly aroma. Nobody said: "Gosh, too bad to waste a perfectly good steak. Hey, can any of you folks eat this all-paid-for hunk of meat?" There were not even hints. The steak just sat there. Sodidl. Wonder what Ann Landers would advise. And what would you have done? Probably just what I did. Nothing. Oh well, It probably was terribly ter-ribly tough. Mac. |