Ritz crackers and other signs the apocalypse is upon us
My mother tells a story, so old it is now frayed around the edges, about the first time she ate a Ritz cracker.
She was 7 years old and living in the small community of Reynoldsville, north of Bainbridge, where she was born in the spring of 1928. My grandmother was a teacher. She was widowed at the age of 20. My grandfather went on a fishing trip and caught pneumonia, a death sentence in those days.
The country was in the throes of the Great Depression. Times were lean and very mean. Like almost everyone, my mother’s family did not have much disposable income. Food was scarce and snacks were a luxury item to most folks.
But when the National Biscuit Company, better known as Nabisco, introduced the Ritz in 1934, it became America’s cracker.
It promised a “bite of the good life’’ for those who longed for better days. It was simple, yet sophisticated. The box with the blue circle and yellow letters cost 19 cents, and it became the great equalizer. The rich fancied the buttery cracker as if it had the glamor of caviar. After all, it was on the menu at the Waldorf Astoria. And the poor could splurge on a box to lift their spirits in the downtrodden times of food rations and soup lines.
One afternoon, my grandmother drove my mother to town, and Grandmama came out of the store with a box of crackers in her hands.
“They were so good we ate the whole box before we got home,’’ my mother said. “So we went back and bought another box.’’