Bunny Bread Archives

January 31, 2017

Raised on Raisin Bread

We Steinhoff boys were raised on cinnamon sugar peanut butter toast made with raisin bread bought at the “used bread store.” Mother would go to the Bunny Bread outlet and buy loaves of the stuff, and turn out a dozen or so slices every morning.

Sounds as much as taste

What I remember more than the taste of the gooey stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth concoction was the sounds of its making.

It would start out with the squeak of the springs in the oven door being pulled down. Then there was a clatter and crashing when Mother removed all the heavy pots and pans stored in the oven. That would be followed by a tinny sliding sound when she took out the warped and bent cookie sheet.

She’d butter up as many slices of bread as the sheet would hold, then sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on them, and stick them in the oven. Just as the sugar was beginning to bubble and, hopefully, before the toast would start to burn, she’d snatch it out of the stove and put a dollop of Peter Pan crunchy peanut butter on it. (I always liked a thin coating of the butter on mine. I didn’t like big globs of the stuff.)

Peach milk shakes

When peaches were in season, she throw some fresh peaches in the blender, along with ice cream and a little milk. Because I was scrawny in grade and high school, she might pitch a couple raw eggs in my shake. Little did we know the delayed effect of that. It took about 35 years for them to add more than the desired bulk.

I don’t do peach milk shakes in the morning, but I DO like a smoothie in the evening. Since I had some fresh strawberries and blueberries for my smoothie, I thought I’d try them on my morning toast. They added an interesting taste change, and looked pretty darned colorful. (The picture was taken with my Samsung Galaxy 7 Edge smart phone. I’m always amazed at the quality it produces. Click on the photo to make it larger.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve found the raisin bread sold at Sam’s Clubs is some of the best around: it’s very dense and has a gazillion raisins. Wife Lila said she likes it with some cream cheese spread on top.

(That’s Son Matt and Grandson Malcolm. Malcolm is sneaking up on his teen years now, but he’s still not crazy about being stuffed into funny shirts.)

January 7, 2015

Patches from the Past

Wife Lila was shuffling some stuff around this afternoon and ran across this pile of patches. (You can click on the photo to make it larger.)

When the Kid Matt and Kid Adam were in middle school and early high school, they had denim jackets that Lila would decorate with patches we had picked up from our travels and from Scouts. The ones on the left are mostly Scout patches; the ones on the right include a lot we got from our Great Family Vacation Out West in 1990.

When the kids outgrew their jackets, their mother would painstakingly take off the old patches and either move them to a new jacket or replace them with newer souvenirs.

The kids got T-shirts from me

When I was on the road, I’d look for custom T-shirts. If there was any kind of big event going on, some entrepreneur would come up with a design, run off a couple hundred shirts and skip town before anybody came around checking if he had a license. I saw a T-Shirt guy get rousted by a couple of cops in Key West during the Boatlift. After a few minutes of conversation, the cops walked off with shirts and the guys were given two days to get out of town (by that time their stock would be gone).

They were usually cheap – $3 or $4 apiece – they were easy to pack, and they were unlikely to be worn by any other kid in their classes.

In that category: Cuban Boatlift; the Whigham, Georgia, Rattlesnake Roundup; Wheeler’s Bar’s Million-Dollar Log; the Pope’s visit to Miami; all kinds of hurricane commemorative shirts; Don’t Mess with Texas, and one from Two Egg, FL. I have two large plastic containers of shirts in the top of the closet just waiting for a quilt or something to spring from them.

That’s Grandson Malcolm in a Bunny Bread T-shirt picked up in Cape at the Used Bread Store. He’s a lot cuter nowadays. His father, Matt, is, well, older.

December 4, 2014

David Louis Motel Sign

Here’s another dip into the Terry Hopkins General Sign box.

When I was doing daily picture pages at The Athens Messenger, I had a technique for having an easy day. I’d shoot something like a old general store and run an outside photo on Monday with the caption, “Tomorrow we’ll go inside.” That let me get a two-fer out of the story.

This is going to be somewhat like that. Today we’ll look at a sign advertising the David Louis Motel, a name that didn’t stick around long. The next day, we’ll go into the history of the renamed motel and see photos of what is there today. You can click on the photos to make them larger.

My perspective has changed

I spent years editing my shooting session down to the most striking and story-telling image and ignoring the rest because newspaper space was finite.

Hanging around with museum folks like Carla Jordan in Altenburg and Curator Jessica in Athens has given me a totally different perspective: I crop more loosely to keep background objects visible and I run more photos that are similar but contain slightly different details. It’s those little details that I used to crop out that contain valuable historical information.

This is a good example. The picture at the top of the page shows the sign best, but looking off to the left edge of the frame above shows the old Alvarado service station and restaurant with its sign proclaiming “The Best in Foods” on its side.

Ward’s Big Star

A frame from a slightly different angle shows the yellow sign for Ward’s Big Star Super Market at the left. I can remember going in there lots of times with Mother.

The store must have been getting bread deliveries: that’s a Hart’s Bread truck on the left and a Bunny Bread truck on the right.

The two red trucks are from Central Asphalt. I thought maybe they were paving the parking lot, but the lot is full of cars.It looks like they may be working behind Ward’s.

There’s no date stamp on the slide mounts. Anybody want to guess about when it was taken based on the cars in the photos?

The trees are devoid of leaves, so it must be either fall or winter. The day is warm enough that the man driving by has his window down, but chilly enough that he’s wearing a long-sleeve shirt.

January 31, 2014

Bunny Bread and Smokey Bear

I was mining a few more nuggets from the photos shot by James D. McKeown III and provided by his son, Steven McKeown, this afternoon. The shots of “Stevie” – I assume that’s a early edition of my Reader Steven – in his Bunny Bread shirt reminded me of the piece I had done on what my family called the Used Bread Store.

Kid Matt had one when he was a boy, and he insisted that his Grandmother find one for Grandkid Malcolm (science fair winner, did I mention that?).

Three icons in one photo

“Stevie” has the trifecta of icons in this photo: his Bunny Bread shirt, a Smokey Bear (NOT Smokey the Bear) and a sailor cap. The only thing that would more a product of the era would have been a Davey Crockett coonskin cap.

The end of the picnic

I tried to see what they had, but there’s not enough left to tell. Looks like a few Cokes were consumed. The bottle on the table has an Ann Page logo, but I can’t make out the rest of the label. There aren’t any flies buzzing around, which is unusual for Missouri.

Typical Cape street

I wonder how much bigger the trees in the background have grown?

I’ll dip into the stash a few more times. He has some interesting photos of a bad windstorm that blew through the Independence area of town, damaging some landmark buildings. There are also vintage pictures taken at KFVS and of Scouting activities.