by Roger Ebert
The motto of Steak ’n Shake is “In Sight It Must Be Right.” No comma. This achieves the perfection of a haiku. There is no skullduggery going on in the back room. Take a seat at the counter and everything happens before your eyes. You watch acolytes in ecclesiastical black and white and little paper soldier caps. The griddle man spears ground beef in the shape of a big marshmallow, positions it on the griddle, mashes it with his spatula. Two, four, six, eight patties, consulting the green and white guest checks lined up before him. He positions the buns facedown on the grill and places a thin wooden plank over them. He turns over each patty and mashes it again. He lifts the plank and places it on the stainless steel shelf before him. He lines up buns on the plank. He blesses a few chosen patties with a slice of cheese. He lifts up the patties and distributes them on the buns. He slides the plank along toward the sous chef in charge of condiments.
The Steakburger is a symphony of taste and texture. Steak ’n Shake has always boasted “We grind all the select cuts—sirloin, porterhouse, ribs, filet.” This they do in “Our Own Government-Inspected Commissary,” located in, of course, Normal, Illinois. The sandwich is Served on a Toasted Bun. If you order onion, it will be a perfect slice of sweet Bermuda. If you order pickles, you will get two thin slices, side by side. Mustard, relish, tomato, lettuce can also be added. When you bite into the Steakburger, it is al dente all the way through: toasted bun, crispy patty, onion, pickle, crunch, crunch, crunch. The Steakburger has remained unchanged since 1945. They don’t add ketchup in advance, because it lends itself to soggy buns. You find a bottle at your table. Also a little bottle of Steak ’n Shake Hot Sauce, which is whole hot peppers floating in water. My father said it was not for the likes of me. He liked to dash it on his Chili 3-Way. I would watch in awe as he sprinkled it on and took his first bite. He would glance at me sideways and elevate his eyebrows a fraction. You see why as a film critic I am so alert to the nuances of actors.
These days at Steak ’n Shake you can order such items as soups, taco salads, chef salads, and Philly cheesesteak. There is a three-page fold-out glossy menu, including even breakfast. I have never ordered an item that was not on the original menu. It is a rule with me. From the start my order was unchanging, unless I added a Tru-Flavor Shake. In Sight It Must Be Right, and you can see the soda jerk combining ice cream and milk in a stainless container, blending them in a mixer, and pouring it all into a big tall glass. Many of today’s children think milk shakes are extruded from a spigot.
My Steak ’n Shake fetish is not unique. On an early visit to the Letterman show, I said to David during a commercial break, “I hear you’re from Indianapolis, home of the head office of Steak ’n Shake.”
“In Sight It Must Be Right,” he said. Our eyes locked in communion.
“Four Ways to Enjoy,” I said.
“Car, Table, Counter, or TakHomaSak,” he replied.
“Specializing in Selected Foods…”
“… with a Desire to Please the Most Discriminating.”
“Thanks for Your Liberal Patronage.”
“Signed, A. H. (Gus) Belt, founder,” he said, and we shared a nod of great satisfaction. Augustus H. Belt founded Steak ’n Shake in 1934, and despite changes in ownership over the years, it preserves the original logos, mottoes, typography, design, approach, philosophy, and recipes. The founder built well.
My wife, Chaz, having been raised in Chicago, knew nothing of Steak ’n Shake. For reasons obscure to me, Steak ’n Shake surrounded the city but never entered it. In 1990, driving downstate to Urbana for my high school reunion, we were passing Kankakee when she said, “Look! There’s a sign for your restaurant.” I smoothly took the interstate exit. The Kankakee store looked much as all Steak ’n Shakes always have, although in the 1970s they added red to the original color scheme of black and white. We took a booth. “Permit me to order for you,” I said. Chaz enjoyed her meal. “I see what you mean,” said the darling girl. That night the Urbana High class of 1960 met at the Crystal Lake Park pavilion for wine, fruit, and cheese. “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand,” said Chris Hastings after a few hours. “Steak ’n Shake!” said John Kratz. “You weren’t kidding,” Chaz said, for I had told her I was not the only devotee in Urbana.
Our cars formed a parade to the Steak ’n Shake on University Avenue, and I was reminded of the universal drive-in ritual: Find a place in the back row, wait until the cars in front of you move ahead, race your engine, jerk ahead in a cloud of burnt rubber, and brake precariously inches from the car ahead. We ordered from carhops, and I remembered a mystery that haunted our high school days: Why didn’t we ever recognize a single carhop? Were they pod people? In recent years curb service has been replaced by drive-thru windows. Customers shout their orders into a squawk box, and if they don’t plan to TakHomaSak, they find a parking space and dine meditatively. In the curb service days, the car windows were all rolled down. You could look straight through other cars to the end of the line, while currents of rivalry, gossip, and lust flowed back and forth. If your friend had his parents’ convertible, you could sit on the trunk with your feet on the seat and command the big picture.
That was on the Friday night. On Saturday the class toured Urbana High School, and at lunchtime it was decided we should inspect the new Steak ’n Shake up on Route 45. “Your classmates are crazy,” Chaz said. That evening we held our banquet at the Urbana Country Club. The club had its own chef, but the dinner committee had decided on catering by Steak ’n Shake. On Sunday morning, as we got into our car at the Lincoln Lodge motel, Chaz took my hand and said, “Let’s not stop at Kankakee.”
9 BLACKIE
EVERY TIME I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can’t even think about the movie’s plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me. I have an empty space inside myself that can only be filled by a dog.
Not a cat. I have had cats and I was fond of them, fonder than they ever were of me. But what I want is unconditional love, and therefore I want a dog. I want to make its life a joy. I want to scratch behind its ears, and scratch its belly when it rolls over. I want to gently extend its tail so the dog can tell it has a fine tail indeed. I want to give it a shampoo, and sneak it bites from the table, and let it exchange the news with other dogs we meet on the street. I want it to bark at the doorbell, be joyous to see my loved ones, shake hands, and look concerned if I seem depressed. If I throw a ball I want the dog to bring back the ball and ask me to throw it again.
If you’ve read John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books, you’ll remember Meyer, the hairy economist, who lived on a neighboring houseboat. He went to dinner with some new boat owners at the marina, and when he got back McGee asked him what they were like.
“They were bores,” Meyer said. “Do you know what a bore is?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me, Meyer.”
“A bore, Travis, is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with companionship.”
For me, that’s the problem with cats. If they follow me all over the house, it’s not because they want to play, it’s because they think something edible might turn up, or that I will entertain them. If these prospects seem remote, a cat will simply stay where it is, idly regard me as I leave the room, lick itself a little, and go back to sleep. I had cats named White Cat, Orange Cat, and Sports Fan. They were swell cats and all that, but they could take me or leave me. After we got married, Chaz confided that she didn’t enjoy the cats jumping on the table during dinner and staring intently at her plate.
“They won’t grab anything unless you leave the table,” I said.
“That isn’t the point,” she said.
I realized that one of the peculiarities of women is that they don’t want their dinner anywhere near inquisitive little paws that have been busy in the litter box. Men aren’t like that s
o much.
I never met a dog that didn’t beg at the table. If there is a dog that doesn’t, it has had all the dog scared out of it. But a dog is not a sneak thief like a cat. It doesn’t snatch and run, except if presented with an irresistible opportunity. It is a dinner companion. It is delighted that you are eating, thinks it’s a jolly good idea, and wants to be sure your food is as delicious as you deserve. You are under a powerful psychological compulsion to give it a taste, particularly when it goes into convulsions of gratitude. Dogs remember every favor you ever do for them and store those events in a memory bank titled Why My Human Is a God.
I can hardly pass a dog on the street without wanting to pet it. If you first let them slowly smell your hand, they’ll usually let you. Some guys will admire a babe’s dog so they can chat her up. With me, it’s strictly a matter of getting to know the dog. Quality time with a dog calms me and makes me feel content. I came across an article from Salon that explained this phenomenon. Friendliness between Man and Dog releases a chemical into both the human and canine bloodstreams, which is why they both like it so much. The chemical is named oxytocin. You’re already ahead of me: Yes, reader, that is the chemical associated with the emotion called Elevation.
I had two dogs when I was a boy, Blackie and Ming. They had those names because the Dominican sisters told us dogs didn’t have souls, and so it would be a sin against the Holy Ghost to give them a saint’s name. This sent me racing to the encyclopedia, because I had never heard of a Saint Roger, although probably it would seem strange to name a dog after yourself. You wouldn’t want your mom shouting through the screen door for the whole neighborhood to hear: “Roger, get your nose out of that garbage and get back in the house!” Luckily, there was a Saint Roger Niger of Beeleigh Abbey, so the question didn’t arise. He was consecrated bishop of London in 1229, so that was good. Blackie was half beagle and half spaniel. Ming was a Pekingese. But not a toy Pekingese, I hasten to add. He was a good-sized dog, earnestly dedicated to chasing things, chewing things, and barking at everything that could not be chased or chewed. You know how you associate certain memories with books? I can never look at Oscar Lewis’s Children of Sanchez without observing that Ming chewed a good half inch off the spine.
On Ming I lavished the attention that Blackie was denied. The tragedy of Blackie was that he was not allowed in the house. My father wouldn’t allow it. This was not because he disliked Blackie. “Boy,” he said, “you picked a bad time to bring a dog home. We’ve just Installed Wall-to-Wall Carpeting.” Somehow you could hear that the phrase was capitalized, right down to the “I” in “Installed.” Wall-to-Wall Carpets were a big deal in the late 1940s, along with picture windows, always referred to as Big Picture Windows. You can see we were up to date at our house. But it is the nature of a dog to take an interest in carpets, and the threat to Wall-to-Wall Carpeting was particularly alarming to my father, because If Anything Happened to It We’d Have to Tear the Whole Thing Up.
Blackie lived in our backyard, and for a blessed summer we were a dog and his boy, running all over the neighborhood—for dogs and boys ran free in those days. He went to baseball games with me, and chased after my bike to Harry Rusk’s market, and we went to the park. He knew all my friends. Blackie had an active circle of his own friends, including his brother Pepper, who lived next door at Karen Weaver’s house, and his pal Snookers, a dachshund who lived one door down on Maple Street with Jackie Yates. Then autumn leaves began to fall. Soon it was winter, with early snow on the ground. I was back in school. Pepper and Snookers went to live inside. As a shelter, Blackie was given my old playhouse in the backyard, with a dog house inside and blankets on the floor. “He’ll grow his winter coat,” my dad said. But Blackie spent long days and nights cold and lonely, and I was acutely aware of this. Blackie would hear the sound of the school bus and start barking for me, and I would run out to the backyard to comfort him, for he would be sobbing. “I’m sorry, Blackie boy. I’m sorry.” My heart was breaking, but I couldn’t stay out there forever. When I went indoors and stood over the hot air register to thaw out, I felt torn up inside. I had betrayed him. But I could understand that my father had a point.
Maybe that’s why Shiloh hit me so hard. The father in that film was essentially right. I showed Shiloh one year at Ebertfest, the film festival I started with the University of Illinois, and our guest was the great actor Scott Wilson, who plays the reclusive squirrel hunter who is so mean to Shiloh. After the movie, we invited kids from the audience up on the stage. A little girl timidly asked Scott, “Mister, why are you so mean?” Scott could have replied by explaining how he was only an actor and it was only a role. He showed what a perfect instinct he has. He said, “Honey, I just don’t know. But I learned my lesson.”
A few months into Blackie’s exile, Jackie Yates’s father, a nice man, mentioned to my father that Blackie howled half the night under their bedroom window. I knew this was the truth, because his lonely cries kept me awake. Sometimes I would open the storm window and call out, “It’s okay, Blackie boy.” But I knew it wasn’t okay, and my voice only inspired more laments. I tried peeking out from behind my curtain. Sometimes in the moonlight Blackie would be standing outside his little house, gazing reproachfully at my window. Through the bedroom door at night, I heard snatches of conversation from the living room: Never stops barking… the boy… the dog… Roger loves that dog… I know, I know… Bob Yates… keeps me awake, too…
It was announced that my cousin Bernardine in Stonington had invited me for a visit. That meant my first airplane ride, in an Ozark Air Lines DC-3 to Decatur. When I returned, we sat in the car at the airport and my mother said, “Your father has something he wants to tell you,” and I knew what it was and my heart cried: Blackie! Blackie had run away from home. Ten blocks from 410 East Washington Street, he ran out in front of a car driven by Enos Renner, husband of my mom’s good friend Frances. The Renners called her after reading his dog tag. I sat in the car and knew this was a lie. Something broke inside of me. What was Blackie doing ten blocks away from home? Why had he conveniently been struck by a car driven by a witness we already knew? At home I fell on my bed and wept and knew that Blackie had not been killed, not by running under Enos Renner’s wheels anyway, and he might be crying for me at that moment at the dog pound. Or he might be dead.
That is the Blackie story. Ming died of battle injuries. He jumped from my bed to snap at a fly, fell wrong, and broke his back. His hind legs were paralyzed. My friend Hal Holmes suggested maybe we could make him a little cart to haul himself around, but we both knew that wouldn’t work. I would have been about twenty then. I have been the rest of my life without a dog. It never seemed like it would be fair to the dog. I was always going out of town on trips, I got home late, its meals would be missed, there was no one to walk it, and on and on. These days it just plain doesn’t make sense. Chaz has her hands full taking care of me. That’s the way it is. It just doesn’t work out that I can have a dog. But there’s still an empty space inside of me, about the size of Blackie.
10 MY VOCATION
IT WAS MY mother who decided I would be a priest. I heard this starting early in my childhood. It was the greatest vocation one could hope for in life. There was no greater glory for a mother than to “give her son to the Church.” There was a mother in our congregation at St. Patrick’s, Mrs. Wuellner, who had given two sons to the Church, Fathers Frank and George, and these two good men came once to visit us at our home, possibly to inspire me.
My father, raised as a Lutheran, attended St. Patrick’s only on such occasions as midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I remember sitting in a front pew with my First Communion class and noticing Father McGinn glancing toward the back of the church. I became convinced that my father was sitting down when he should be standing up, or otherwise indulging in disgraceful non-Catholic behavior, and I wanted to turn around but didn’t dare.
My father stayed out of it. On most Sundays he stayed at home. He explained this gave him
a chance to read the Sunday funnies before I wanted them. That seemed to me an excellent reason for staying home. There was also the problem that he would lose his immortal soul, having been offered the opportunity for salvation through the Church and renouncing it. I remember an occasion when my mother, briefing me in the kitchen, deployed me into the living room to pray on my knees beside his chair, beseeching heaven for his conversion. My father was a good sport about this and thanked me. He said he needed some time to think it over.
In my childhood the Church arched high over everything. I was awed by its ceremonies. Years later I agreed with Pauline Kael when she said that the three greatest American directors of the 1970s—Scorsese, Altman, and Coppola—had derived much of their artistic richness from having grown up in the pre–Vatican II era of Latin, incense, mortal sins, indulgences, dire sufferings in hell, Gregorian chant, and so on. Jews likewise had inspiring ceremonies. Protestants were victims of sensory deprivation.
The parish priest was the greatest man in the town. Our priest was Father J. W. McGinn, who was a good and kind man and not given to issuing fiery declarations from the pulpit. Of course in Catholic grade school I took the classes for altar boys. We learned by heart all the Latin of the Mass, and I believe I could serve Mass to this day. There was something satisfying about the sound of Latin.
Introibo ad altare Dei.
Ad Deum qui laitificat juventutem meum.
“I will go to the altar of God. The God who gives joy to my youth.” There was a “thunk” to the syllables, measured and confident, said aloud the way they looked. We learned in our altar boy classes when you stood during the Mass. When you knelt. When you sat during the reading of scripture and the sermon. When you rang the bell, when you brought the water and wine. How to carefully hold the paten under the chins of communicants so a fragment of Holy Eucharist would not go astray. Later, there were dress rehearsals at the St. Pat’s altar.