They're Hippie Sandwiches. And I Love Them.
Campbell's Nutrition Center makes my favorite grab-and-go sandwiches in town. Some remind me of the 1970s, in all the best ways.
One afternoon the spring I was 10 years old, my mother was driving me home from my piano lesson, when the signals at a railroad crossing started flashing and the gates came down. As my mother sat back and watched the passenger train pass, she suddenly realized something. “That’s it. That’s the final run of the Corn Belt Rocket,” she said. “That’ll be the last passenger train through Des Moines.” We rolled down our windows and waved to the handful of passengers, who, perhaps grasping the moment, waved back.
I think of that whenever I remember the Soup Kitchen, the Drake-area vegetarian restaurant where I worked as a teenager in the late ’70s. By then, the era of hippies—and hippie-run vegetarian/health-food restaurants—were fading; you could feel it in the air. Still, I felt like those passengers on the Corn Belt Rocket might have felt—knowing …