fitchburg Archives - New England Historical Society

Before New England gave the world Howard Johnson’s, Dunkin Donuts, McDonald’s and Subway, it invented the Waldorf Lunch.

The Waldorf Lunch System emerged in 1904 as one of the earliest chain lunch rooms. It was a time when all kinds of quick lunch spots emerged: lunch wagons, coffee-and-cake saloons and temperance spas. Schrafft’s, an offshoot of the Charlestown, Mass., candy company, started a lunch room in Boston in 1898 as an outlet for its candy. The Worcester Lunch Car Company would soon churn out prefab diners.

Waldorf Lunch was different. Its founder, Henry Kelsey conceived of standardized restaurants serving volumes of reliable food at good prices in clean, white-tiled lunch rooms.

Waldorf Lunch with car in front in Harvard Square.

Marketing emphasized its reliability. A 1922 ad said, “There’ll be good, fresh coffee at the Waldorf Lunch today. It’s always the same.”

At the company’s peak, 200 Waldorf Lunch restaurants fed the urban masses in seven states, but mostly Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and upstate New York. Waldorf Lunch disappeared in the 1960s, gobbled up by a multinational corporation and pretty much forgotten. But in 2016 a restaurateur uncovered some of the original Waldorf Lunch tiles in a Harvard Square restaurant. He decided to restore them. If only he could restore the prices.

Waldorf Lunch History

Waldorf Lunch served food with dependable quality at a time when diners weren’t sure about what, exactly, appeared on their plates. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which exposed unsanitary meat-packing practices, would sell 25,000 copies in six weeks in 1906. The public outcry resulted in the federal Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts of 1906.

Henry Kelsey founded the first Waldorf Lunch in 1904 in Springfield, Mass. He named it after the Waldorf Hotel in New York City – according to lore, on the suggestion of a passerby as he prepared to open. He served coffee, donuts, sandwiches, soups and basic meals.

Advertising copy in 1922 pointed to the Dutch origins of the word “Waldorf.” An ad boasted of four inspections every 24 hours in each Waldorf Lunch and 398,000 pounds of cleaning powder annually. “I’d call that housekeeping to beat the Dutch–as you might say,” wrote the copywriter.

In 1906, Kelsey started another Waldorf Lunch in Boston. By 1919, when he expanded to 38, the company went public. From then it grew even faster. By 1929, it had 147 eateries, a fixture on the urban scene, with many open 24 hours, wrote James C. O’Connell in his book, Dining Out in Boston.

Ladies dine at a Waldorf Lunch in Charlestown, Mass., in June, 1950.

In New England, hungry diners could find 29 Waldorf Lunch restaurants in Boston. Providence had 10 Waldorf Lunches by 1916. They also sprang up in Pawtucket and the Massachusetts cities of Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Fitchburg, Haverhill, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, New Bedford, Salem, Springfield, Waltham and Worcester. Manchester, N.H., had at least one, and so did Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury in Connecticut.

“Travelers could count on the Waldorf for a certain standard of food quality and environment,” wrote O’Connell. “It was a significant step up from downtown Boston’s beaneries.”

Fred Allen Visits Waldorf Lunch

Comedian Fred Allen in his memoir, Much Ado About Me, reminisced about his favorite cheap eats while growing up in the Allston section of Boston.

Beginning in 1908, Allen worked at the Boston Public Library after school, and he passed a Waldorf Lunch on the way home. He would look in the window and see the white-tiled walls, the inviting chairs, the smiling waiter standing behind the glass counter with the tempting foods on display. He couldn’t resist, so he went in and ordered a trilby and a glass of milk, five cents each.

Fred Allen in the 1940s

“A trilby was a fried egg served a la mode with a thick slice of onion,” he wrote. “Encased in a large bun, well seasoned with salt and pepper, and doused with ketchup until the ketchup flowed down the sides of the bun on to the plate to be dunked in later, the trilby was guaranteed to end off malnutrition indefinitely.”

The System

Modern efficiency was the watchword during the heyday of the Waldorf Lunch System.

The company carefully calculated every portion at a central commissary–in Boston, on High Street, near what is now International Place.

“Each serving of hash has been carefully measured and done up in waxed paper before being sent to the member stores,” reported the 1922 manual, Chain Stores: Their Management and Operation.

“All baking is done in the central commissary which operates twenty-four hours a day. In 1920, the average meal costs 30 cents and the company made less than two cents profit on each meal. But that year Waldorf Lunch served 36 million meals, and made a “substantial profit.”

A Waldorf Lunch commissary

Waldorf Lunch restaurants had five-foot-long stands with an assortment of food. A waiter stood behind each. For hot foods, he called to the cooks, who delivered each order over a shelf that separated him from the kitchen.

Restaurant historian Jan Whitaker, in a 2004 essay in Gastronomica, described the appeal of the quick lunch restaurant:

“It was precisely the quick lunch’s up-front, hard-surfaced reality that made it dear to the hearts of the poets and intellectuals of the machine age. To them the quick lunch was the symbol of its time, representing lively urban humanity, basic functionality, and a what-you-see-is-what-you-get-style.”

Restaurant Associates bought the Waldorf System Corporation during the conglomeration craze of the 1960s, and by the 1970s it had disappeared. But not entirely.

Harvard Square

In 2015, a restaurateur named Ayr Muir planned to open a vegetarian restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue in Harvard Square. A demolition team came in to tear down the interior of the former Yenching restaurant, which served Chinese food since 1975. Before that, starting in the mid-1930s, it had been the Hayes-Bickford, another popular Boston-based lunchroom. And before that, it had been Waldorf Lunch, starting in 1913.

The crew found grime-covered tile pennants in the wall: Harvard, Bowdoin, Carlisle Indian School. They also found white-tiled walls embedded with crimson H’s (for Harvard). Muir decided to save the tiles

The former Waldorf Lunch in Harvard Square

You can see them now at the Clover Food Lab in Harvard Square.

“It would have been unconscionable to just have let that history disappear,” Muir told The Harvard Gazette. “This store has an important story to tell.”

Images: 1913 Waldorf Lunch tile By Macrakis – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89858555. Interior of Waldorf Cafeteria, courtesy Rev. Wolcott Cutler, Boston Public Library, Charlestown Branch CC BY 2.0.

With thanks to Dining Out in Boston by James C. O’Connell and Restauranting Through History blog by Jan Whitaker. This story was updated in 2023.

New England high school football rivalries go back to the days when teams traveled by stagecoach to visit their opponents. When there were no field goals or forward passes and when no one was really all that sure about the rules. When schools held fundraisers to buy the ball – which, by the way, was round.

Many people associate high school football rivalries with the South. And yet New England, with 4.5 percent of the U.S. population, has about a third of the centuries-old high school football rivalries in the country. But considering that players originally called football ‘the Boston Game,’ perhaps it’s not all that surprising.

Beginning in 1875, New England high schools have celebrated their football rivalries with bonfires, pep rallies, parades, snake dances, community dinners, alumni reunions … and fights, riots, bomb threats and eggings.

In no other region do so many high school football teams play on Thanksgiving Day every year. Many, but not all, of the Thanksgiving Day games involve ancient rivalries. Massachusetts has about 50 of them, Connecticut 15 and Rhode Island about 20.

Northern New England has only two Thanksgiving games, probably due to the weather. Manchester, N.H., holds a Turkey Bowl to determine the league champions, and Portland, Maine, features a crosstown rivalry between the Deering High School Rams and Portland High School Bulldogs.

In 2020,the COVID-19 pandemic put all those rivalries on hold, as state and school officials canceled entire football seasons.

Boston Latin-Boston English. Classic.

Before the Civil War, football was more of an excuse for a brawl than an actual game. But then a more organized version evolved. Boys from East Coast prep schools began to play what they called the Boston Game, something of a cross between rugby and soccer.

Then a group of students from Boston schools, including Boston Latin and English High, formed the Oneida Football Club. They played pickup teams starting in 1862 on Boston Common. In 1925, surviving members dedicated a small monument on their old playing field. They bragged they’d not only never been beaten, they’d never allowed an opponent to score.

Artists’ rendering of an Oneida Club game on Boston Common.

The Oneida Club disbanded after a few years. Then in 1887, Boston Latin played English High on Thanksgiving at Harvard Stadium. They did it again for 130 consecutive football games. It’s the oldest continuous Thanksgiving high school rivalry in the country.

Latin tends to beat English (they’re 80-38-13), and in 2011 the Wolfpack gave the Bulldogs a 50-0 drubbing. With Latin ahead 44-0, Latin let a woman player onto the field, senior Kathy Le. The crowd cheered.

Massachusetts has 11 other high school football rivalries that go back more than a hundred years.

Some Thanksgiving games between rivals attract thousands of fans, like the 100^th annual Salem-Beverly contest in 1998. The game drew 11,000, a bigger crowd than struggling Major League Baseball teams can sometimes lure to their ballfields.

Beverly’s first team

Needham-Wellesley

Five years before Latin and English went after each other on the gridiron, Needham and Wellesley high school athletes played their first game. The rivalry started when West Needham and East Needham split up in 1881 amidst a bitter controversy. They took their high schools with them, so West Needham became Wellesley.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1882, they started the oldest public high school football rivalry in New England.

As the two teams lined up on the crooked midfield line, the Wellesley captain realized he only had nine players. So he sent his brother into the stands to find two more.

The rivalry intensified over the next few years, and by the end of the century both teams used ringers – including ‘out-of-town professionals.’ Then in 1901, the schools limited ringers to town residents, which made for lousy football but good boxing. Several fistfights livened up the game, which featured frequent fumbles and ended in a 0-0 tie. Andrew Wyeth’s uncle managed the first all-boys’ team in 1906.

The Needham-Wellesley Thanksgiving rivalry had to take a break for the world wars because so many players enlisted. Officials also cancelled the games from 1950-52 because rioting broke out.

As recently as 1991, the game was called because of a bomb threat on the field. It turned out to be a prank by some Needham High School kids.

Fitchburg-Leominster

In 1898, the eighth Fitchburg and Leominster game went to a 0-0 score until the last two minutes. Then Fitchburg scored on a punt return — with the help of the hometown crowd, which kept any tacklers away from the ball carrier. The referee ruled the game a scoreless tie.

The next day the Fitchburg Sentinel had the audacity to report a win with the headline, “Fitchburg Wins 5-0.” The score stayed in the record books that way until 2010, when a Leominster Sentinel and Enterprise reporter insisted on changing it to 0-0. At the end of 2019, the Leominster Blue Devils have played the Fitchburg Raiders on Thanksgiving 104 times. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the match-up in 2020.

Norwich Free Academy vs. New London

Six years after the first ever collegiate football game, two Connecticut high schools started the longest high school football rivalry in history: Norwich Free Academy and New London High School. Ulysses S. Grant was president.

It started on May 12, 1875, and it hasn’t been continuous. But it has been fierce, with faculty sometimes playing as ringers. One year a Norwich-favoring referee let the clock wind down a little too slowly, time enough to let his Wildcats score the winning goal.

In 1898, the Wildcats were playing the Whalers in New London when a sudden snow squall enveloped the playing field. An NFA punter kicked the ball in the air, and it disappeared. The game ended since the teams had no more balls.

Another game ended early four years later, when Norwich Free Academy scored 130 points on New London in the first half. The game was called.

The Norwich Free Academy football team, 1898.

In NH, It Starts in Little League

On New Hampshire’s Seacoast, boys start hearing about the epic rivalry between Dover High and Rochester’s Spaulding High when they’re in Little League. In 2011, 30,000 fans watched the teams compete in a playoff match.

One long-tenured Rochester coach brought such intensity to the game that the Dover players believed he spied on their practices from the nearby woods. And whenever a small plane flew overhead, they’d stop their drills and mill around the field because they thought Spaulding wanted aerial photos of their practices.

In 1969, the Spaulding Red Raiders and the Dover Green Wave played their 63^rd game to a 0-0 tie. A rainstorm reduced the field to a quagmire, the players so covered with mud it was hard to tell the teams apart. A Red Raider claimed he scored a last-second touchdown, but no one could tell for sure.

Weather conditions probably explain why the three Northern New England states have only two Thanksgiving Day games — the Manchester, N.H., Turkey Bowl and the game between Crosstown rivals Portland Bulldogs vs. Deering Rams at Fitzpatrick Stadium in Maine.

Cony, Gardiner and … Chizzle Wizzle?

“Chizzle Wizzle, Chizzle Wizzle, sis boom bah! Cony High, Cony High, rah, rah, rah!”

That cheer for Augusta’s Cony High School Rams inspired students in 1892 to form the “Chizzle Wizzle Association” to raise money for the team. The Rams faced the Gardiner Tigers that year in their first of many games.

Miss Aldine Holmes kicked off the first Chizzle Wizzle in 1893 with a piano solo and Miss Cusick and Mr. Studley ended it with a duet. Ice cream and cake were served during intermission.

If that sounds decorous, the games were anything but. Ten years after the first game, the Gardiner Journal called the schools ‘old time rivals’ and complained of rowdyism.

Gardiner won by 2-0 in the 1910 game that involved quarreling and ‘the mixing up of the crowd and the players after nearly every play.’

After losing the 1926 game, Cony students threw rotten eggs at the Gardiner fans. ‘One girl’s hat, stockings and coat were ruined,’ reported the Gardiner Journal, which also noted Gardiner fans ‘went home quietly with sad faces,’ when they lost. Augusta, on the other hand, didn’t feel the need to be ‘sportingly generous.’

Augusta’s Chizzle Wizzle now lasts four days and ends with a ball, not a brawl. Cony students claim it’s the longest running high school variety show in the country. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic drove the variety show online.

A Marine recruiter talks to Cony players after they beat Gardiner in 2016. Photo courtesy U.S. Marine Corps.

Vermont’s ‘The Game’

In Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom they just call it ‘The Game’ – the St. Johnsbury Academy Hilltoppers vs. the Lyndon Institute Vikings. In 2013, a USA Today survey of the country’s greatest high school football rivalries. ‘The Game’ won the Vermont, New England and Eastern regions and finished fourth in the United States.

Sometimes thousands of fans attend the game between two towns that don’t have 15,000 residents between them. Excitement mounts in the week before the contest, with bonfires, a parade, class floats, a pep chapel, an alumni dinner and, as the Caledonian Record put it, ‘screaming teens.’

These Vikings really wanted to win.

The rivalry dates to a game played on Oct. 27, 1894. Lyndon had never played an opponent before and lost 28-0. To commemorate the 100^th anniversary of The Game, a state lawmaker (clearly a St. Johnsbury fan) sponsored a resolution that gloated over that first victory. Even though anyone who could even remember the game was probably long dead.

But on that ‘auspicious and historic’ fall day, the resolution went, the two teams ‘met on the gridiron’ to play the ‘new and intriguing sport’ evolving into one of Vermont’s ‘favorite autumnal activities.’

In that game, the two squads of ‘interscholastic athletic pioneers’ played a game in which St. Johnsbury ‘demonstrated their strategic mastery’ and ‘handily defeated’ Lyndon.

Three Miles Apart

No two high school football teams have played as many games against each other as Westerly High in Rhode Island and Stonington High in Connecticut. Though in different states, the schools are only about three miles apart. They’ve played against each other since 1911, and in 1913 they started playing on Thanksgiving as well as during the regular season.

The town Rotary Clubs take turns holding a dinner for both teams the night before the Thanksgiving game. The schools hold pep rallies in their auditoriums and the townspeople go to nighttime rallies on the commons.

By 2018, the Westerly Bulldogs and the Stonington Bears had played 98 games on Thanksgiving Day, with pretty even won-loss records. The 2018 game was a mismatch, though, with Westerly beating Stonington by 61-0. That, however, was only half as bad as the 1917 game, when Westerly beat Stonington by 122-0. In fairness, most of Stonington’s first-string players had enlisted and left to fight World War I.

There’s a terrific mural commemorating the rivalry behind C.C. O’Brien’s Irish Sports Bar and Café at 8 Mechanic Street in Pawcatuck.

Andover vs. Exeter

Two of the greatest ever football coaches played in one of the greatest ever high school football rivalries.

Amos Alonzo Stagg suited up for Phillips Exeter’s Big Red nearly a hundred years before Bill Belichick played center for Phillips Andover’s Big Blue.

An Andover-Exeter game. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones collection.

Stagg probably had to take a stagecoach for away games. Belichick was there in 1971 when some Andover students got caught trying to spray paint Exeter’s field blue.

The oldest private high school football rivalry began on Nov. 2, 1878 when both schools had existed for about a century.

Stagg, a poor Irish student, attended Exeter with the intention of going to Yale as a divinity student. But as a standout athlete he felt sports calling to him, and he ended up playing key roles in the development of intercollegiate football and basketball.

Belichick, the son of an assistant coach at Annapolis, went to Andover as a postgraduate to improve his chances at college. He played center in a game against Exeter that left the team undefeated. Buzz Bissinger, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for Friday Night Lights, reported on the game for the Phillipian. They won 34-8. Belichick, 37 years later, gave his daughter Amanda a felt pennant with the score of that game on it when she entered Andover.

He later said he learned about the science of football at Andover, and that he owed the school a lot. Patriots’ fans should be forever grateful.

Bill Belichick at Andover with his friend Ernie Jones.

Massachusetts High School Football Rivalries

Phillips Andover Academy and Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) since 1878.
Wellesley High School and Needham High School since 1882.
Milton Academy and Noble and Greenough School (Dedham) since 1886.
Boston English High School and Boston Latin High School since 1887.
Malden High School and Medford High School since 1889.
Winchester High School and Woburn Memorial High School since 1891.
Beverly High School and Salem High School since 1891.
Newburyport High School and Amesbury High School since 1891.
B.M.C. Durfee High School (Fall River) and New Bedford High School since 1893.
Athol High School and Ralph C. Mahar Regional High School (Orange) since 1894.
Leominster High School and Fitchburg High School since 1894.
Newton North High School and Brookline High School since 1894.
Barnstable High School and Falmouth High School since 1895.
Reading Memorial High School and Stoneham High School since 1899.
Marlborough High School and Hudson High School since 1900.
Melrose High School and Wakefield High School since 1901.
Whitman-Hanson Regional High School and Abington High School since 1910.

Connecticut High School Football Rivalries

Norwich Free Academy and New London High School since 1875.
Ansonia High School and Naugatuck High School, since 1895.
Shelton High School and Derby High School since 1904.
Stonington High School and Westerly (Rhode Island) High School since 1911.

Maine High School Football Rivalries

Cony High School (Augusta) and Gardiner High School since 1892.
Thornton Academy (Saco) and Biddeford High School since 1893.
Hebron Academy and Kents Hill School since 1894.
Lewiston High School and Edward Little High School since 1897.
Portland High School and Deering High School (Portland) since 1911.

New Hampshire High School Football Rivalries

Phillips Exeter Academy and Phillips Andover Academy since 1878.
Spaulding High School (Rochester) and Dover High School since 1906.

Rhode Island High School Football Rivalry

Westerly High School and Stonington (Connecticut) High School since 1911.

Vermont High School Football Rivalry

St. Johnsbury Academy and Lyndon Institute since 1894.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the list of oldest high school football rivalries. This story was updated in 2022.

fitchburg

Before Dunkin’, New England Had the Waldorf Lunch System