Taking a Stroll Down Memory Lane - 0001

For awhile I was whining that because I was running out of matches, I wouldn't be able to grill. My wife and I looked everywhere for the stash of matches but all of our efforts were to no avail. This morning though, while I was sitting around threatening that "without matches I cannot grill," my wife found a bag full of them. Apparently and for some strange reason we collected about 100 books of matches over the years. We went through each one and we literally took a stroll down memory lane.

This blog entry has nothing to do with food and cooking but I have to write about it because it will help me/us heal.

It was the fall of 1982. It was a good year and a bad one too. We made an unsuccessful attempt to move to Greece. As we were flying back to the US, Eileen and I had a conversation about our future. The jobs we had at the time were taking us nowhere and we decided that I had to go to college so I could get a real job afterwards. We talked about it with Miles, my brother-in-law, and he strongly recommended that I attend Erie County Community College because Kodak and IBM were recruiting from that school every year. So the decision was made to move to Buffalo, New York.

In 1982, in Buffalo the unemployment was in the 15% area. Plants: Chevy and Bethlehem Steel, were laying off people left and right and jobs were hard to come by. Since I only knew the restaurant business I started looking for a job. Finally I landed a job at Salvatore's Italian Gardens. I worked there two to three nights a week. The tips were great and the staff was very friendly. Russ, the owner, only fired me once because I failed to come to the restaurant mid-week to check the schedule and I missed going to work one very busy night. He recanted his decision and let me work there again.