My father grew up during the Great Depression. I remember him telling me he saw pizza in Jersey City but never tried it because it looked disgusting. It was around pre-war but not to the extent that everyone had an occasional pizza. My mother is Italian so her memories are different on the subject.
McDonalds was a rare luxury when I was young. Eating out happened a little more often when my mother went back to work in the late 70s.
That’s exactly my memories, growing up in the 80s. Outside of family vacations, I think we were lucky if we went out to eat at a sit-down restaurant twice in a year. Fast food or take out (usually Chinese or fried chicken) maybe another one time a month. I remember being so jealous of my friends who would get delivery pizza, and I did my best to plan my trips to my friends house on take out pizza days. 
I literally have no memory of my parents ever ordering delivery pizza.
Texas Hold 'em. Poker in popular culture was always five card draw. Suddenly, two in your hand and five on the table is what poker is. Daniel Craig’s Bond played it at the Casino Royale.
But listen to Kenny:
“Every gambler knows
That the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away
And knowin’ what to keep.”
How do you do that if everybody keeps everything?!
Yeah, I remember it becoming popular in the early 00s. Maybe even late 90s, but early 00s is when I showed up at poker games and they all started being Hold 'em games instead of the usual stud or draw.
I was certainly aware of Texas Hold 'Em as a kid. But that was mostly through reading books on poker and because of a game called “Card Sharks” by Accolade for the Commodore 64, where you can play against Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Gorby, in various card games, one of the them being hold 'em (three poker games were offered: 5 draw, 7 stud, hold 'em.)
According to Wikipedia, the song or poem “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” goes back at least four centuries. The words vary, but always involve a woman wearing a yellow ribbon while waiting for a lover to return home.
I believe this research is based on the fantastic (dare I say classic?) 1980s book by Stern and Stern, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.
I have to admit that I find it really surprising that you never had a slice of pizza until you were in college. I was under the impression that you were about my age, and from upstate NY. I grew up in New Jersey, and pizza places were extremely common in the early 1960s. There were several in my home town (which wasn’t all that large). I would have viewed someone getting their first slice of pizza ever in their first year of college as an anomaly.
And maybe I was. But looking back I don’t remember a single pizza place (or Chinese restaurant) in my part of town. And it wasn’t my first year, either, but junior or senior year.
It certainly started out as a Mexican-American tradition. Which still makes it an American tradition with a 150 year pedigree.
Personally, I don’t remember a time when Cinco de Mayo wasn’t widely celebrated in California. But then, I was born the same year you took that history class.
Incidentally, I’ve managed to make it through 41 Thanksgivings with ever seeing a green bean casserole in person.
I just asked my in-laws about this. They’re an Irish/German family, grew up on Long Island and had pizza when they were kids, but their aunt (born in Brooklyn in 1916, worked in Manhattan, lived in Queens and Long Island) never had it until one day when she went out with them. This was in the late 1960s so she was in her early 50s before she ever ate pizza.
I’m with Miller. Anglo born in Southern California in 1966 - I remember that every year in elementary school we went to watch the mariachi bands and Jarabe dancers at an assembly. And they always made sure to emphasize that Cinco de Mayo was NOT Mexican Independence Day.
But yeah, turning it into a drinking holiday (the Mexican St. Patrick’s Day) seems a lot more recent, maybe early 90s or so.
How about Kwanzaa? Invented in the 1960s, but the first time I’d ever heard of it was on the Simpson’s episode where Bart is listing all the missed holiday gifts his grandmother (Homer’s on-the-run mother) owed him. That episode aired in 1995.
A few years later, Hallmark started carrying Kwanzaa cards, Party City was getting in on the act, and it started showing up printed on calendars. Once corporate America realized they could monetize it, it become a “tradition”.
^^ Anyone like to comment on the Quinceañera celebration? A certain Explorer girl had one not long ago.
Not everybody’s from Boston, John.
I got pizza as a kid but they were those Appian Way pizza kits[sup]1[/sup]. The only other pizza I was aware of[sup]2[/sup] were the Bambino’s Pizzas at the drive-in’s snack bar. I jonesed for one all through my youth but we never got one. Thinking back on it, it’s probably just as well.
[sup]1[/sup]Mom was a great cook but this was a fast and cheap way to feed us three, when Dad was on the road.
[sup]2[/sup]I would put the odds of a pizza joint somewhere in Phoenix circa 1960 as 50/50. My German/Scandahoovian parents never looked for one.
Mother’s Day brunch. While Mother’s day has been around for long enough, this tradition of “must take mom to brunch on Mother’s Day” seems rather new to me. When I was a kid (only about 20 years ago), maybe one or two restaurants did a special Mother’s Day brunch. Maybe restaurants that already did brunch had something special, but very few restaurants went out of their way to set up a special Mother’s Day brunch. I think my siblings and I (i.e. my Dad) took my mom out for Mother’s Day brunch maybe once growing up. We made her breakfast or picked up some doughnuts after church for a special treat.
Now, it seems like every restaurant has a Mother’s Day brunch. Restaurants that aren’t normally open for breakfast open hours early and bust out the eggs bennies. Mimosas flow and they’re reservation-only. Restaurants open their special-events ballrooms to make room for all the extra diners. It seems like if you don’t take your mom out, you’r a bad child.
As I recall, I went to a pizza parlor for the first time (also my first sit-down restaurant) to celebrate my First Holy Communion, so it must have been around 1959. This was in the Bronx. As I recall, this was the first pizzeria in the immediate neighborhood, and might have been open a year or two. I’m sure there must have been pizza parlors earlier in parts of the Bronx that were more heavily Italian.
My mother retired from the telephone company 15-20 years ago and before retiring she worked in directory assistance. The busiest day of the year for that department was Mother’s Day. Now, there’s really only one phone call you absolutely must make on that day, and if you don’t already know your mother’s number, well, I can’t help you. On the other hand, many people are calling around to find a place to take mom for lunch or brunch or whatever. So I assume the restaurant business has been big on that day for a while.
Mineo’s Pizza was the go-to neighborhood pizzeria when I was a kid. They opened the year I was born (1958). We both turned 60 recently.
Well, yeah, but like the Reverend Jonathan Witherspoon, I’m from New Jersey. Boston and New York, of course, were filled with pizzerias. I find gkster’s aunt an anomaly, too – she must’ve been surrounded by pizza joints that she just never patronized. Even Exapno’s case seems odd. Rochester had a heavily Italian population, and was awash with pizza places in a staggering variety of styles by the time I got there in the late 70s.