clair094

Editor's Note: A few weeks back, P&PC came across the late nineteenth-century business card for Michigan hotelier Magnus Hallgren pictured here. While we admire his hipster 'stache—and while his attire makes us think of Robert Frost's " A Hundred Collars "—we haven't been able to find out much about Hallgren himself except that, in 1889 ( according to Michigan Supreme Court records ) he was appointed Street Commissioner of the City of Menominee, Michigan, after former commissioner William Campbell, who "graded and graveled a road on the town line" without city council permission, was "removed from office." It's not Hallgren's style, occupation, or court appearance, but his taste in poetry, that got the attention of P&PC, however. Like Dr. C. B. Weagley Veterinary Surgeon , C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium , The Palace Saloon and Restaurant , and the City Cab Company of Hays, Kansas —Hallgren had a poem printed on the ...

A couple of weeks ago, P&PC brought you the matchbook poem- ulations of El Fenix Cafe in Texas—the oldest Mexican restaurant chain in the United States. Turns out that El Fenix wasn't the only enchilada in the West to serve up poetry with steaming portions of homemade food, however. Just two states over, in Williams, Arizona, Route 66-era Rod's Steak House was doing El Fenix one better, one-upping the cafe's folding poetry-delivery system with the cool steer-shaped table menu pictured here. Founded in 1946 by Rodney Graves, a Maine- born, onetime surveyor for the U.S. Coastal and Geodetic survey, Rod's is proud of its menu design, boasting on its web site that "The registered trademark menu, die cut in the shape of a steer, that the restaurant uses today, is the same one Rod used to open the Steak House with back then." Given the steakhouse's emphasis on the "registered trademark" status of its menu, it's a little ironic that the poem ...