Nothing beats aroma of an old burger joint

The world is full of hamburger joints, but they lack the incredible aroma of those old-time cafes you could find along the side of the road in almost every town in South Dakota when I grew up.

I remember most the smell of hamburger patties frying on a grill as broad as the deck of an aircraft carrier. At a corner of the grill, hamburger buns browned slowly. While the burger fried, the cook cut a huge pickle into thin slices to toss atop the patty. The finished burger came to the table with the edges fried black and the center deep brown and oozing juice.

The moment you walked into one of those places and smelled the grill, you knew exactly what kind of burger would be served. I recall a place like that on a curve near Mount Vernon, I think it was — not very far west of Mitchell, anyway. It wasn’t fancy, but it always had room for one more group of diners, and my dad loved the place.

If we’d go to Mitchell for basketball, he’d haul out of town as quickly as he could after the game, passing the great-looking places in the big city and beating it down old Highway 16 to the roadside café near that big curve in the road. Looking back, I guess he must have thought everyone else leaving Mitchell and heading west planned to stop at the same place, because he truly hurried over that patch of highway. Even today when I catch a whiff of burgers cooking on a grill, I think of the way my dad beat it down the road to get there ahead of the crowd.

Some of the fancier places began to throw a couple of leaves of lettuce and a slice of tomato into the bun, and even a slice of onion. They called those things California burgers in some places. They were all right, but nothing beat the basic browned bun, grilled patty and pickle slices. Smother that baby in catsup, and you had yourself a lunch, a full-course dinner or a late-evening snack to break the routine of cruising the streets with a couple of buddies, listening to rock and roll on KOMA and dreaming about prom dates.

Every town, I suppose, had a teen hang-out where the hamburgers were cooked that way and the kitchen was wrapped in that unmistakable aroma.

Ours was the truck stop at the top of the hill just east of Chamberlain. When I was in high school, Highway 16 had a great many curves and bends, and just before a traveler reached Chamberlain, the road made a sharp corner from west to north and swooped down the long hill into town. The truck stop sat near that corner, far enough from town to seem like an adventure but close enough to be reached by a carload of teen-aged boys with $2 for gas and another few bucks for the burgers and malts.

That’s where we went on lazy evenings when we tired of dragging main, swapping stories from the school day and arguing over the relative merits of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. While we waited for our orders, we’d take turns at the pinball machines in the corner, unless a trucker on a late dinner break was running up a score.

I wasn’t much good at pinball — too timid, I guess — and when the guys yelled at me to put some action into the game, I always went overboard, and pretty soon the pinging and ringing stopped and the flashing TILT sign mocked my miserable effort. My regular buddies knew that would happen, and they kidded me without mercy when it did.

I didn’t mind, although I had to pretend that I did. I only played the machine to be one of the guys, and I was pretty realistic about my skill level. No way in the world was I ever going to rack up a free game, much less have free games lined up across the screen the way Dale Waysman and Ron Ballou could.

I did it to be with those guys, and to be around when the burgers reached our booth.

Terry Woster’s column appears Saturdays and Wednesdays in The Daily Republic.

Tags: terry woster, opinion