photograph courtesy Memphis Evening Appeal
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Before the money ran out (when Papa absconded with the family fortune), the Lauderdales normally dined at four-, five-, and (on Saturday evenings), even six-star restaurants. Even so, we enjoyed a tasty snack now and then from what are today called "food trucks." I believe the first time we encountered these "meals on wheels" was at the old Tri-State Fair, and later the Mid-South Fair, where trailers disguised as food vendors handed out hot dogs, fiddlesticks, funnel cakes, and even (at one particular booth, the delicacies of the Rhineland.
photograph courtesy Memphis Evening Appeal
CoffeeTrailer3
But even though we regarded these as novelties, they slowly and steadily grew to the point where now it's hard to drive down any of the highways and byways of our city without passing one, with a line of hungry customers outside. And they've become so popular that our magazine even has a special category for them in our annual Readers Restaurant Poll. As I recall, Cousins Maine Lobster was voted "Best Food Truck" of 2021, with runners-up Say Cheese and Central BBQ — showing how far these little places have come from the simple fare handed out at the, uh, fair.
But food trucks and trailers are nothing new. Flipping through the yellowed pages of the January 1928 edition of the Memphis Evening Appeal — I assume you're already read your copy? — I came across a news story about a Memphian, H.B. Freeman, with the headline: "Portable Home and Coffee Factory." Here's a somewhat dim image of that home/factory (above). I'm sorry the images are so fuzzy; it's the best I could do, squinting at newsprint almost a century old.
But here's Freeman's story. While working as a night watchman at the Municipal Auditorium here, he got to thinking, as we all do, that there must be more to life than just work work work, and he wanted to combine his two interests — that would be coffee and travel — into what he called his "House-Truck-Coffee Mill."
"My idea was to install a coffee grinder and roaster in the front of my house truck," he told reporters, from his home on South Lauderdale (a fine street, named for a fine Memphis family). And he wasn't going to purchase coffee from just anywhere in town, either. "I will buy my coffee direct from South America, grind it, roast it myself, and sell it directly to the consumer."
He constructed his little coffeehouse on an old truck chassis. "When he decides to move," reported the Appeal, "all he has to do is lift up a cloth flap, crank it up, and start. Freeman expects not only to travel throughout the country, but to gain independence with his coffee sales."
The whole venture cost him about $500. "I dreamed it all out myself," he said, "and with my wife, built it. And now — my dream has come true."
