That's me sitting on the old stoop of the apartment
building I once called home. Photo by Trudge164 © 2008

Growing up in Astoria, Queens, New York City, in the ‘70s, we played a lot of  two-hand touch football, stickball, Ace-King-Queen (a derivative of handball), off –the-stoop, or we just hung out at the stoop.  The summers in Astoria were scorchers. With the heat, humidity and unbridled air pollution (I remember when the New York Daily News first started running the Air Quality Index in the weather section of its newspapers), things got hot.

So after a game of stickball (or whatever we played that day) or a couple of hours of wearing down our jeans by sitting on the stoop, me and my “perros”, as my mom would refer to the pack of jackals I used to hang out with, would walk over to Irving’s (a local candy store) and buy some refreshments.

Personally, I am a Coke and Potato Chips man. Always have been, always will be, but every now and then my taste buds would scream for something completely different, and it wasn’t “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. And this is when I would order a can of cream soda and a bag of Old London Cheez Doodles (later it was bought out by Wise). No Cheetos for me; it had to be Cheez Doodles or nothing. There was something about that combination of sweet vanilla and processed cheese puffs that was purely sublime. I would devour the entire bag and then lick my alien-orange tinted fingers. Yum!

Bag of Old London Cheez Doodles

Bottle of A&W Cream Soda

Yesterday, on the way home from work, the local radio station announced that Morrie Yohai, a native New Yorker (born in the Bronx) and the co-creator of the Cheez Doodles passed away at the age of 90 due to cancer; he died on July 27^th.

The Cheez Doodles was invented more by way of serendipity than by R&D. According to Mr. Yohai, “We were looking for another snack item,” he said. “We were fooling around and found out that there was a machine that extruded cornmeal and it almost popped like popcorn.” He was health conscious, “so it was baked, not fried.”

Thank you, Mr. Yohai for making such a memorable snack. You really were all that and a bag of ... cheez doodles.

Sources:

Old London Cheez Doodles

The Times Leader

Text and photo of apartment building ©Trudge164, 2010