Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [36]
Now one of the best-known speeches in American history, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was greeted first by a stunned silence and then by wild, prolonged applause for the man who was guiding the nation through the Civil War and preserving the Union. He was a fantastic guy and a true lover of freedom. His assassination did nobody any good. John Wilkes Booth simply killed a very good man.
As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, I had arrived in Springfield swithering, as we say in Scotland, between whether Lincoln was a truly great guy or just an ordinary guy made to look great by history. By the time I left, I was in no doubt. To abolish slavery and to keep the Union of America intact were two extraordinary achievements. I ended the day wishing I’d had the chance to meet Lincoln. I think he would have been a friend of mine. I reckon I would have liked him and I hope he would have liked me.
In a few hours I’d completely changed my opinion of the man. And I kinda like that. I’m not locked closed on everything.
Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I climbed on to my trike, headed out of the cemetery, passed the Illinois State Capitol Building (built from Romeoville limestone) and arrived at the home of the Cozy Dog, one of the birthplaces of fast food.
This was the place where Bob Waldmire, that fabulous artist who lived on a bus, grew up watching the traffic on Route 66. His father, Ed, invented the Cozy Dog after visiting Oklahoma and eating a speciality of the state – a corn dog – which is a sausage baked in cornbread. Ed liked it, but thought it took far too long to prepare. He mentioned it to a pal, but then the Second World War intervened and he thought no more of it.
A few years later, when Ed was stationed in Amarillo, Texas, with the US Air Force, his pal wrote to say that he had developed a batter that would stick to frankfurter sausages, allowing them to be deep-fried. He sent some of the batter to Ed, who tested it in the air force kitchens, creating a thickly battered hot dog on a stick. Ed called them ‘crusty curs’.
These meat lollipops became hugely popular on the air force base and around town, so when Ed was discharged in 1946, he decided to set up a restaurant to sell his creation. But his wife thought ‘crusty cur’ was a terrible name and suggested Cozy Dog instead, possibly because it was like a hot dog in a blanket. Their Cozy Dog restaurant in Springfield was the first fast-food joint on Route 66. For the first time in history, big groups of people were driving long distances and they needed places to grab a quick bite to eat. Cozy Dogs could be prepared in advance, so the customers could grab one and then just keep driving.
Incidentally, did you know that it took a wee while for anyone to come up with the idea of putting a frankfurter in a bun to make a hot dog? The story goes that a Bavarian sausage seller called Anton Ludwig Feuchtwanger had been selling frankfurters with a pair of white gloves so that his customers could eat the hot sausages in comfort. But when the customers started keeping the gloves as souvenirs, Feuchtwanger responded by serving his sausages in rolls. Nobody seems to know for sure whether he first tried this at the 1893 World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition in Chicago or the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis. Whichever it was, Feuchtwanger is credited with inventing the hot dog, although I can’t believe that nobody thought to put a frankfurter in a bread roll between the thirteenth century – when