The Tennessean: A place for democracy in dining

I hate hearing, much less using, that cliché “back in the day,” but I had one of those thoughts the other evening while needlessly burning $4 dollar-a-gallon fossil fuel in a long drive-though line at one of the mega fast-food chains near my home on Indianapolis’ south side. I anticipated a neatly arranged, sculpted and reasonably warm burger clone, the exact kind you can find anywhere between Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Outer Mongolia. Those guys have it down to a sad, predictable science.

I found myself drifting back to Central High School, circa 1970, in downtown Evansville, Indiana. Opened in 1854, it was and remains to this day to be the oldest continuously operating high school in the nation west of the Allegheny Mountains. I was in the last freshmen class as the school would move to a new location on the city’s north side. The school and its gym across the street were stately and reasonably maintained, but the classrooms smelled like a nursing home that has avoided inspection for years.

Then there was the cafeteria, which some dubbed the “Choke and Puke.”  It wasn’t that the food was that terribly bad – your standard, limited and bland menu – it was the setting which drove many of us to pocket our lunch money or use it to buy cigarettes. It wasn’t uncommon to have a piece of ceiling plaster plop into your plate or see something dark oozing up from between the cracks in the floor tiles.

But there were a few options available to a kid willing to sneak off campus to grab a bite. Many of us chose the Tennessean, located a few blocks away from Central. It was a squat, small facility, and frequented by an eclectic clientele.  Where else could a zit-faced “greenie” freshman sit at a counter stool with the likes of cops, clergy, rheumy-eyed winos, working stiffs, well-groomed businessmen, GIs, perfumed bouffant lady shoppers, and occasionally the mayor? If you eavesdropped, you’d hear off-color jokes, pointless and sometimes pitiful stories, rumors and outright lies. The Tennessean was a true democracy in dining.

The joint grinded out the finest cuisine of Polish sausage, grease-slathered fries and other quick fixes for the gut. It’s famous stout coffee could double as napalm.  But the Tennessean’s renowned specialty was the hamburger. Many referred to it as the “splatburger.”

And for good reason: the cook I remember (a beefy guy with forearms hairier than Sasquatch) usually wore a dirty, dripping apron as he went about his work. First, he’d roll a wad of ground beef into a ball and slap it down hard onto the greasy griddle. Then he’d raise a huge spatula like an angry samurai and crash it down, turning the ball of meat into something flatter than a politician’s acceptance speech.  

Then your burger would join its cousins and onions in a sizzling chorus, a sound which would have made Handel scream Hallelujah!  What a gastronomic experience it was to wolf down that sandwich, fries and a syrupy, cherry Coke. A student had to make quick work of it though, given the so-called lunch hour was actually closer to thirty-five minutes – and then happily burp his or her way through the remainder of the school day.

There were a few occasions when me and my friends would skip class, usually something unimportant like math or science, and head down to the diner. It probably explains why I ended up in journalism. My children and grandchildren surely will weep at the reading of my will.

A few years later, I ate my last meal at the Tennessean a few days before boarding a Greyhound bus for Army basic training. The ambience, surly service and cuisine was the same.  It closed back in the late 1980s, as did its twin restaurant bearing the same name several blocks away.

In a day when fast-food giants compete nearly side by side on virtually every street corner and boast of caloric and nutrition strides they are making with their muck, I yearn for that greasy-spooned downtown diner.  A place where a kid could learn a few things, avoid picking plaster out of his Jell-O and sink his teeth into a splatburger.