Once upon a time, there were three families living on an island in Puget Sound, Washington. The children in the families, like children all over the world, voiced their summer complaint: “I’m bored. I have nothing to do.” What’s a parent to do when he/she hears these words? My response, when my children were young, was: “Go read a book.” Or, “Use your imagination.”
Those parents in Washington, however, rose to the challenge and came up with a game to amuse their youngsters, pickleball, a combination of tennis, badminton and pingpong. The rest is history.
There are a couple of stories about how the game got its unusual name. One explanation was coined by the wife of one of the originators. She said, “The combining of different sports reminded me of the pickle boat crew where oarsmen were chosen from the leftovers of other boats.” The other origin story is that Pickles was the name of a family dog. There never was consensus among the creators of the game.
While pickleball began in the Northwest, it took off across the country and even in other parts of the world. Residents in Naples, Florida refer to their city as the Pickleball Capital of the World. Maybe, but recent numbers show that there are 418 million picklers playing in this country alone.
Without detracting from the sport, when I hear the word “pickle,” I think of that salty, briny cucumber that enhances my favorite delicatessen sandwich: pastrami on rye bread with mustard and sauerkraut. My paternal grandparents lived on the Lower East Side of New York City during the 1940s. It was a time when streets bustled with immigrants, many of them Jewish, who left Eastern Europe for a new life. The area teemed with people, pushcarts, produce and pungent aromas wafting from neighborhood stores and restaurants.
One of my father’s earliest culinary memories is of “fishing” for a nickel sour pickle in a barrel outside an appetizing store on Orchard Street in Manhattan. Pushcarts lined the sidewalk as he grabbed the pickle, bit into it and watched the juices run down his chin. Those barrel pickles have disappeared along with the pushcarts (think of our modern food carts) as neighborhoods became gentrified. Even the delis gave way to more trendy eating emporiums. There was estimated 3,000 delicatessens in NYC in the 1930s and only a few dozen remain today.
The children of immigrants dispersed all over the country and Los Angeles became one of the meccas for their offspring. It’s not surprising, therefore, that curators at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles, a center devoted to Jewish culture, decided to tell the deli story from a West Coast perspective. They created an exhibition that will travel all over the country. So far, it is scheduled to head to Houston, Skokie, Indianapolis, Chicago and Miami before arriving at the New York Historical Society in November.
The deli sandwich with its pickle on the side reminds me of Rob Reiner’s mom in the film, “When Harry Met Sally,” who spoke that iconic line, “I’ll have what she’s having!” The moral of this story is that there is more than one way to think about pickles.
Dorothy Dworkin is a freelance writer and writing teacher.
