Summer in this city will never be the same. Never the same as the 30-plus years in which we have been partaking of delicious fast foods under the trees and near the river in Wakamow Valley.
The news that the Burger Cabin would not open this summer, nor any other summers to come, was a bolt out of the blue for hundreds of us who tended to linger after we’d finished our mushroom burger and chocolate milk shake. Why rush home when at the Cabin we could visit with friends, watch canoes float by on the river, see the occasional fox come close enough to accept a potato chip, entice the birds with tidbits of bun or watch the squirrels teasing the leashed dogs.
But alas, Carol Wray Sooker is hanging up her burger flipper and is looking towards new opportunities. She is shuttering the cabin and closing the gates to the beautiful area where picnic tables, children’s play equipment and landscaped lawns and flower beds greeted the hundreds of customers who regularly ate and enjoyed her outdoor food venue.
So come summer 2021, what will we do on Mushroom Burger Monday or Weenie Wednesday? Newcomers to the city would look puzzled and tentatively ask: “What is Weenie Wednesday?”
Those of us in the know would eloquently explain and be greeted with more puzzlement that anyone of our age would be excited over what to them was a mere hotdog. There was nothing hotdoggish about Weenie Wednesday.
The other days of the week were equally filled with a variety of meal choices: a cabin burger that tasted more like the original teen burger at the A&W than teen burgers of today; chicken strip dinners with too many to eat in one sitting; and onion rings freely served in place of French fries with the combos.
Housemate especially liked the ice cream sandwiches made with ice cream frozen between two cookies. I once offered to try to make them at home in the off-season, but he refused, saying he could wait until the Burger Cabin opened in the spring for his special treat. He likely thought mine would not be comparable and he was correct, darn it all!
In the early days of our marriage, we took advantage of the low, low price of hamburgers on Mondays at the Swing-In Drive-In. We would buy the 10 burgers for a buck and Housemate would make inroads into many of them, leaving one or two to be eaten the next day. Before those days a group of us from my small community would drive into Moose Jaw and pool our resources to buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken at the forerunner of the Burger Cabin.
The flood of 1974 was devastating for the Wray family’s fast food restaurant and it would be 13 years before the community could once again eat a burger or chicken in that area of the park.
And so in the summer of 2021, there will be summer in the city, but it will be a different kind of summer without Mushroom Burger Monday, and Weenie Wednesday. A regular wiener in a bun just won’t have the same impact on us or the city’s visitors.
Joyce Walter can be reached at ronjoy@sasktel.net
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
