Topeka Daily Capital
June 21, 1959

The grizzled Old West Texan was sitting on the patio of this huge and luxurious new home when somebody asked him what’s it like, now that he had struck oil on his parched land and had become a very rich man.

“Well,” he said, “Before we hit oil, we lived out here in a shack and we cooked inside and went outside because there was no plumbing inside. About the only difference now is that we go inside, but damned if we don’t cook outside.”

This analysis offers two interesting possibilities as subjects for today’s epistle – outdoor privies and outdoor cooking. It happens that I am somewhat of an authority on both, but I will deal first with the latter, which, to me, is a problem bigger than wheat rust and tornadoes.

What I mean is, if an outdoor privy is all you’ve got, you’ve got no choice. But outdoor eating is something too many people are doing by choice, and I believe it’s a national mental condition that ain’t healthy.

I say the wheels of progress are on the wrong track. I say outdoor eating is for idiots, hobos and TV cowboys.

Just the other day the relatives dropped in to spend Sunday, and I wasn’t surprised to learn a picnic had been planned. These things always are planned in my absence to avoid violent disturbances.

“Let’s go to Gage Park,” said one of my young sons.

“Let’s go to Lake Shawnee,” said somebody else.

“Too crowded,” said another. “Let’s just go out and find a spot on the river”

“Why not just go out on the patio?” said still another.

 “Why not,” I suggested with an icy calm, “just stay right here in the family room where it is air-conditioned and where the ball game will be on television and where the beer will stay cool in the refrigerator and where …”

They were looking at me like I was carrying the Black Plague or twisting a child’s arm – which was what I was doing to the one who said Gage Park.

Whoever started this outdoor idiocy must have been raised in a tent. Eat outside – where the wind blows everything over and gets dirt on the food… where insects have their real picnic and flies have a ball… where what is supposed to be hot gets cold and what is supposed to be cold gets hot… where you sit on ground or balance a meal in an outdoor type chair or climb into a $50 set of planks called a picnic table…

Some people wrap up this bundle of mealtime chaos and label it “modern living,” but for my money, it’s the modern example of how civilization always insists on doing some things the hard way.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a charcoal man myself. I bow to no man in my admiration for a steak done up just right over the charcoal. I’ll even go outside to fix it. But just because you go out to do it there’s no reason to stay out and eat it.

Outdoor eating, so far as I can tell, has only one redeeming feature. Somebody usually is pouring during the hours it takes to set up and prepare an outdoor meal so that by the time it’s ready to eat, everybody overlooks the handicaps and discomforts.

Meat, raw or burned into a black hunk of shoe leather, tastes just great when buried under great gobs of jarred glob, the cold beans hit the spot and somebody bites into the sand in the salad and says, man, this lettuce is crisp.

About that time one fly says to another, “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that they were smart enough to invent the wheel.”

You outdoor eaters may think you’re really living, but I think you’re nuts. I’m an indoor man myself, and I don’t stop with plumbing.