T.A. Dorgan "hot dog" story-- discredited but still out there

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

Barry Popik sent me a  cc. of the "hot dog" item below, and I now forward it to ads-l.  The T.A. Dorgan/Polo Grounds "hot dog" story is charming but, it turns out, fictional.  Dorgan arrived in NYC from San Francisco in 1903, and "hot dog" is well attested already in the 1890s.

The persistence of an incorrect etymology is remarkable. The Polo Grounds/Dorgan story is a hardy perennial, and one of the few certainties in life is that at least once every year or two a journalist somewhere will print that story as legitimate.

Gerald Cohen
P.S. If Mr. Kogan (whose name, incidentally, is ultimately the same as Cohen) would like any detail about "hot dog," he need only ask.

________________________________

From: Barry Popik [mailto:bapopik at aol.com]
Sent: Mon 6/21/2010 4:59 AM
To: rkogan at tribune.com
Subject: "We" like the Polo Grounds "hot dog" story--proven false over 20 years ago?


You do know that Gerald Cohen and I wrote a book on the "hot dog" (ask Bruce Kraig, of the Chicago Culinary Historians) and disproved the Polo Grounds "hot dog" myth many, many years ago?
...
Barry Popik
www.barrypopik.com <http://www.barrypopik.com/>
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...
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-06-20/features/ct-sun-0620-sidewalks-hot-dog-20100620_1_hot-dog-red-hot-dachshund-sausages-park-district

Sidewalks: Hot dogs on the run


Mobile vendors have enough to worry about - and smile about

June 20, 2010|By Rick Kogan, Tribune newspapers

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        Charles Osgood/Chicago Tribune

Recently my colleague Phil Vettel made an impassioned plea for more food trucks operating on city streets, writing, "We've already got off-site cooking along the Chicago River. If chefs can cook safely on Lower Wacker Drive, they certainly can do so in a new mobile kitchen."
And so, one day, we might be able to gobble, Vettel tells me, "meatballs," "filet sandwiches" and perhaps even "cheesecake on a stick" from trucks around the city.
In the meantime we must make do with more prosaic but no less satisfying fare, and my favorite among these street foods is the hot dog.
Though there are a number of stories about the origin of the name hot dog, we like the one that starts on an April afternoon in 1900 outside the old Polo Grounds in New York: Baseball fans were offered skinny sausages from vendors shouting, "Get your red hot dachshund sausages!" A cartoonist sketched a drawing of barking sausages for the next day's paper. Unable to spell "dachshund" and presumably too lazy to look it up, he came up with "hot dog."

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