Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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In the summer of 1944 when I was 12 years old, I made my first of several annual visits to Camp Lazarus, a Boy Scout camp South of Delaware on the banks of the Olentangy River. It was the first time I ever spent a week away from home, and I felt like I was becoming an adult, a seasoned traveler.
I enjoyed that place. Every day was full of fun. There was hiking and camping. There was swimming and canoeing. There was climbing and lots of games, like capture the flag.
Then there was the food. We ate all of our meals in a large mess hall. It probably held a couple hundred boys, and we all loved the food. Even their bologna sandwiches were great. I almost always went back for “seconds”.
Today, of course, I realize it wasn’t that their food was so good. It was because all that climbing and swimming, and canoeing, and hiking made us all so hungry, that we would wolf down anything they put on our plates.
There was one thing, however, that was really special. They served it for breakfasts a couple times during my one week stay. It was called “French toast”. I loved it. In fact, I thought it was the best thing I had ever eaten for breakfast. And I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my mother about it.
As we sat around our dinner table on my first night home, I told my parents what a great time I had at camp. Then I told them about the “French toast”, and how good it was!
I don’t think my mother had ever heard of “French toast”, but when I told her how much I liked it, she asked me to tell her more about it. When she heard my description she said, “Oh, you’re talking about “fried bread”.
I had to laugh at that. It seemed obvious to me, that I had become a more sophisticated diner than my mother. It wasn’t her fault, of course, because she had never been to Boy Scout camp. So I could understand how she might confuse French toast with something as mundane as what she called “fried bread”. That didn’t sound very special at all.
She tried to tell me that the French toast I like so much was, indeed, fried bread, but like a lot of 12-year-old boys, I thought I had reached a point in life, where I knew more than my mother.
When I got up the next morning and came down for breakfast, I was both surprised and thrilled, when my mother put my plate in front of me. It was two slices of French toast, plus some crispy bacon. When she put the plate on the table, she said, “See how you like the fried bread.”
By golly, her fried bread looked just like the French toast we had at camp. But it tasted even better. I think that was because she didn’t use that bottled syrup. She topped it with real maple syrup from her favorite sugar camp in Logan County. I loved it.
From that day forward, I never again ate French toast. Instead, I always have “fried bread”. You might want to try it yourself sometime. It’s really good.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at
williamboyd514@gmail.com