Errant journalistic treatments of "hot dog"

[Gerald Cohen]

    The journalistic items reproduced below by Barry have no more
significance than a pimple on an elephant's behind. The important
developments are the "hot-dog" book I'm presently compiling (authors:
Popik, Shulman, Cohen) and Becky Mercuri's "hot dog" book (in
progress), both of which give due credit to Barry for his
extraordinary research. Bruce Kraig also has an article in the works,
and in several e-mails he shows he is well aware of Barry's research
and the falsity of the Dorgan/Stevens/Polo Ground story.

    As for Barry's website, it's a major undertaking, and several
ads-l members have already congratulated him for starting it. I now
join them in this.

Gerald Cohen



At 4:13 PM -0400 7/25/04, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>JULY IS THE CRUELEST MONTH
>   This week, from your Google News.Three wrong articles.
>
>It's been nine years since I did my work on "hot dog." My name has not made a
>single one of these newspaper articles. This will continue my entire pathetic
>life.
>
>
>(CHARLOTTE OBSERVER)
>Posted on Mon, Jul. 19, 2004
>At home or at the game, just relish the hot dog
>
>
>RON GREEN SR.
>
>
>Here's a heads-up for you, in case you had forgotten, or never known, or
>never really cared -- Wednesday is National Hot Dog Day, so let's
>hoist a jar of
>mustard to all hot dogs, living and dead.
>
>The dead ones we eat, especially at sports events, from baseball games down
>to catching lightning bugs. The living hot dogs are the ones who orchestrate
>end zone celebrations, shake their heads after they dunk, take half
>the night to
>circle the bases after hitting a home run, yell "Go in the hole" to get on TV
>-- you know the type.
>
>It is the dead hot dogs we actually salute today, though, the ones we eat,
>because, well, darn it, we love 'em.
>
>It is a little known scientific fact that a person cannot attend a baseball
>game without eating a hot dog.
>
>There are 26 million hot dogs consumed each year in major league ballparks.
>That is, of course, only a small percentage of dogs we consume. We
>eat billions
>every year. We eat 60 per person per year in the United States.
>
>We in the newspaper profession are proud to note that one of our own, a
>sports cartoonist working for a New York newspaper, coined the name
>hot dog. On a
>cold day in 1901 at the Polo Grounds, the concessionaire was doing little
>business with his ice cream and cold sodas. He sent his salesmen out
>to buy up all
>the dachshund sausages (that's what they were called at the time, for obvious
>reasons) and rolls they could find.
>
>In less than an hour, vendors were hawking dachshund sausages in the stands,
>probably yelling, "Red hot! Get yer red hot dachshund sausages right heah!"
>
>The cartoonist, Tad Dorgan, felt his deadline approaching fast. He needed an
>idea. When he heard the vendors, he drew a cartoon of barking dachshund
>sausages nestled in the rolls. He didn't know how to spell dachshund
>so he called
>them hot dogs.
>
>Thanks to Tad Dorgan, it cannot be said that the guys in the press box have
>never contributed anything better to society than the rumpled look, a few
>clichés and a sizeable thirst.
>
>
>
>(FORWARD, July 23, 2004) (formerly, JEWISH DAILY FORWARD--ed.)
>THE FOOD MAVEN: Good Dog!
>A Summer Taste Test
>By Matthew Goodman
>July 23, 2004
>There's no way to know this for sure, but I would suggest that kosher
>frankfurters first entered the wider American consciousness in the
>1970s, thanks to,
>of all things, a TV commercial. In this commercial - for those of you who
>threw out your televisions in the 1960s - a man dressed as Uncle Sam stands
>holding a hot dog in front of him, while a stentorian-voiced
>narrator recites some
>of the additives (nonmeat fillers, etc.) that the American
>government allows to
>be put in frankfurters.
>
>"We don't," intones the narrator after each item, as Uncle Sam's smile grows
>increasingly forced. Cue the heavenly choir; Uncle Sam gazes upward, to where
>the sun is breaking through the clouds. Proclaims the narrator (the term
>Omniscient Narrator would not be inappropriate here): 'We can't. We're Hebrew
>National, and we answer to a Higher Authority."
>
>This prodigious bit of marketing jiujitsu took the kosher laws, which never
>had mattered to more than a very small segment of the population,
>and made them
>a selling point for the population at large. We even might look to this as
>the moment when many Americans first began to view kosher food - not always
>correctly - as healthy food, such that today the majority of kosher
>buyers are not
>even Jewish.
>
>Of course, kosher frankfurters had been around for a long time before Uncle
>Sam ever held up one to the camera. The first recorded appearance of a
>frankfurter of any kind on American shores was in 1867, in the
>Brooklyn, N.Y., seaside
>community of Coney Island. A German immigrant named Charles Feltman, who
>earned his trade selling pies from a wagon that he pushed along the
>beach, found
>that many of his customers were asking for hot sandwiches, as had begun to be
>sold in the restaurants along the boardwalk. Fearing a drop-off in business,
>Feltman hired a mechanic (the annals of food history know him only as Donovan)
>to construct a charcoal stove on the back of his wagon. Thus equipped, Feltman
>began plying hot sausages to the local beachgoers; he wrapped the sausages in
>a bun, in the German fashion, and called his creation, "Frankfurter
>sandwiches," after his hometown. Feltman's gambit proved so
>successful that within the
>decade he had opened his own restaurant on the boardwalk, the eponymous
>Feltman's, which by the turn of the century had grown into a vast
>food complex,
>turning out frankfurters from seven grills, delivered to patrons by as many as
>1,200 waiters.
>
>However, eventually Feltman's ingenuity would spawn the seeds of his own
>undoing. In 1915, a former employee of Feltman's, Nathan Handwerker, set up a
>stand across the street from the restaurant and began selling
>competing hot dogs.
>(The term "hot dog" had been coined nine years earlier, after the Chicago
>cartoonist T.A. "Tad" Dorgan drew a cartoon showing a dachshund inside a
>frankfurter bun.) Like Feltman before him, Handwerker named his
>hot-dog stand after
>himself, calling it - need I even say this? - Nathan's Famous. At Nathan's hot
>dogs cost only a nickel, half of the price that was being charged across the
>street. But they differed from those of Feltman's in at least one more
>significant respect: Nathan's frankfurters, like all Jewish sausages
>before them, were
>made from beef rather than pork.
>
>
>(ANN ARBOR NEWS, July 23, 2004)
>Hot dog vendors on a roll
>
>Carts let people know when summertime is really here
>
>Friday, 23, 2004BY STEPHENIE KOEHN
>
>News Staff Reporter
>(...)
>Hot dogs, originally known as "hot dachshund sausages," reportedly got their
>name in 1901 from sports cartoonist Tad Dorgan, who heard vendors at the Polo
>Grounds in New York yelling, "Get your dachshund sausages while they're red
>hot!" He sketched a cartoon depicting the scene, but wasn't sure how to spell
>"dachshund," so he called them, "hot dogs." At least that's one version of the
>story.