Going out to eat with Grandma during my childhood meant going with her and Mother to the River Room in Schuneman’s Department Store, the Capitol Room in the Golden Rule Department store or the Tea Room at the Emporium in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. My memories of the way the River Room looked were confirmed by the post card below from the 1940s that I recently found.

Mother drove us downtown and Grandma invited us to lunch. At the table in the restaurant it was clear who was in charge. Grandma always summoned the waitress, managed the ordering and paid the check. And Grandma always had something to complain about to the waitress! Mother, and even I as a child, found this fault-finding embarrassing.

When I went out to eat with Grandma and Grandpa we often went to the Criterion Cafeteria. I thought it was great fun to push your tray along and pick out what you wanted to eat. Dad didn’t like the place at all and often tried to talk his parents out of going there. But my grandparents liked it especially because it was inexpensive.

You could say that eating out with Grandma had its entertaining side. Another piece of family history that Mother related to me described the “Family Circus” when the relatives were together in International Falls. There the “Family Circus” featured an act called “Grandma pays the bill.” All of the visiting family members trooped of to a restaurant to have dinner together. Afterwards Grandma asked for the check and informed everyone that she was paying. Now, some unwritten rule dictated that it wasn’t nice to let Grandma foot the bill. This meant then that everyone began unobtrusively opening their wallets and taking out what they felt was their share of the unknown total. With nods of the head in Grandma’s direction the money was passed from hand to hand under the table. Mother found that Grandma played her role in the family circus very well and probably made a good profit with her annual appearance in the act “Grandma pays the bill.”