THE MENCHENS
DUCK?!
Another couple living in our area that became good friends was Fred and Audrey Eilen. Audrey was an excellent cook. Once she served roast duck and, although I am not a fan of duck, it was delicious. I had three servings. I decided I would make duck for my family. Things get boring if you don’t try new things. I bought two ducks. They sat in the freezer for a couple of weeks before I got around to cooking them. I didn’t think I needed any special instruction to prepare them – how much differ- ent could it be from cooking a chicken? Wrong. It was a disaster. The grease from the ducks was all over my oven. I could have avoided that simply by asking Audrey about it. When I served the meal to my family they were shocked. DUCK! Duck is a pet not a meal. We don’t eat duck! No one wanted to eat the meal. Well, I was still reluctant to give up so the next day I bought some lobster meat and mixed it in with the duck. It didn’t fool anyone. “We know the duck is in there with the lobster!” Oh well, I tried. It was an expensive mistake and I never made duck again.
Marilyn and Bob Menchen became very dear friends. I had actual- ly met Marilyn briefly in the elevator of my friend Selma Dennenberg’s place in Palm Aire on one of our earlier visits to Florida. Selma had let us stay at her place while we looked for a business. Marilyn was very excited that she and her husband had just found a house. It was sheer coin- cidence that we wound up living next door to them. Herman and Bob Menchen were like broth- ers, always kidding each other. A few months earli- er I had arranged a fiftieth birthday party for Herman . Marilyn and Bob made it possible for us to hold the party in their clubhouse even though we didn’t live in their community at the time, although we would a few months later. The party was a huge success, one of the best I ever threw, and a complete surprise for Herman. We had about forty-five people attending it, which still surprises me since we had lived there such a short time. The guests included my sister, Pearl and her husband, Al, and the families of the people we bought our new business from. AN EXPENSIVE LECTURN I remember that Stephen came home from college with a lecturn he
Cassidy Shooster, my granddaughter sitting at an old switchboard in Seattle
had made. Herman asked Bob over to see his $5,000 lectern. That’s what it had cost us in tuition. Bob countered with an offer to trade the lectern for two of his $2,500 poems. They were always trying to outdo each other. When Michael was in the business of making novelty license plates Herman had one on the front of our car with two gold stars on it. When he went through toll booths people would salute him. Bob wanted one too. So Herman got him one, except that Bob’s only had one star. Eventually Marilyn and Bob moved to Chicago where Bob went to work for the Chicago Board of Trade. Marilyn worked for a chain of optical stores and then in a bridal department. One day a package arrived from Chicago with a letter in it written in the tiniest possi- ble handwriting on a hard-boiled egg. It was so clever I kept it for weeks. Herman thought it would be funny if we replied with a package containing chicken bones to signify that the egg had hatched.
Dorothy at Ding-A-Ling Answering Service at E. Oaklank Park, Florida
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