For the first Throwback Thursday of the new year, I harken back to one of the most infamous and celebrated stories of my youth. The exact date is lost to posterity but it would have been in the late 1960’s or so and I would have been somewhere between 9 and 11 years of age or so. Already voracious and precocious but still in need of a babysitter if left alone. We lived in a very old house a few miles outside of the small town of Bainbridge Ohio. The first time this house had been on the tax rolls was way back in 1812 so it was quite the historic place. (This is also the house featured in a previous Throwback Thursday about the Mad Magazine stickers left on the wall. You can find it by searching for stickers or Bainbridge in my back posts or just use the link below.)

https://wordpress.com/post/walterthinnes.blog/10856

This is a picture of that great old house.

So, that evening both of my parents had separate school events, I think Parent/Teacher meetings, one with my younger sister and one with my younger brother. That left me home alone and so they arranged for a baby sitter and instructed her to warm up some of the leftovers in the refrigerator for our meals. My folks were frugal and not very well off and were very wise about food preparation and storage. They had two freezers on the back porch and my mother would make huge pots of stews and concoctions and then freeze the leftovers to be warmed up later for future meals. Those freezers were often pretty full of a wide range of family meals.

The baby sitter made the mistake of asking me what I wanted to eat. My favorite meal from my mother was a spaghetti with meat sauce that was delicious. I had helped her make it for the family previously so I took the lead. My family were hearty eaters and used two of those blue boxes of spaghetti noodles for the hungry troupe and two big frozen containers of the meat sauce. I helped the baby sitter get it all set up and cooking before she realized how much we were preparing. Don’t worry, said young and hungry me, I’ll finish it off. Though there were no photographs of the event but it looked a little like this:

And yes dear readers, other than a small plate for the baby sitter, I finished the entire thing off with copious coverings of that green tube of parmesan cheese that no one was there to keep me from piling on top. When my parents got home my mother was furious. I had managed to ingest a meal meant for the entire family all by my lonesome self. I was henceforth named the boy with the hollow leg, who could eat anything and everything put in front of me. Mind you I am paying for it in my elder years but I still love a heaping platter of steaming spaghetti with meat sauce. My advice is to get in line ahead of me if you planned to eat anything at all. Again, there is no photographic evidence of that fateful day but I looked something like this:

Happy National Spaghetti Day! Hmmm, what’s for dinner tonight?