Today’s Zippy strip displays our Pinhead’s onomatomania, as he chants CAR WASH HOT DOG over and over, to his evident pleasure. I was entertained by the notion of a car wash hot dog, which struck me as ludicrous, conjuring up the image of sodden, sudsy frankfurters in buns:
(#1) But then I remembered that Zippy’s obsessively reiterated chants are never sheer inventions on his part, but are always found mantras, so car wash hot dogs must be a real thing — and so they are, on the understanding ‘hot dogs at a car wash, hot dogs with a car wash, hot dogs and a car wash’, or, as they are sometimes advertised, car wash / hot dog sales
This was all news to me; I didn’t recall ever having heard of selling a car wash along with hot dogs and didn’t think the two things were a natural pairing. But there they were, lots of them, car wash / hot dog sales for very local causes.
Why had I never heard of them? Because they are not just an American thing (unknown in the UK, Australia, and so on, even in Canada), but a very specific regional American thing, apparently confined to a narrow band of the southeastern US, from Florida to West Virginia. (Zippy’s Dingburg is in Maryland, which is, with West Virginia, at the very northern edge of this band). I have lived in the middle Atlantic, New England, mid-America, and California, but not in the southeast, and so I missed out on C. W. H. D. (as Bill Griffith’s title for #1 has it).
Fund raisers for very local causes. A sampling of events, from Florida to West Virginia (if CW/HD has spread elsewhere, there’s little evidence of it on the net):
a sale for the Northside High School (Cloverdale VA) bands
a sale at North Citrus Christian Church (Citrus Springs FL) for Trail Life (Scout) Troop 3946
a sale for the Fountain Inn (Fountain Inn SC) High School Band of Fury
a sale for the Belvedere Commons (Seneca SC) senior center
a (touching) benefit for Shelby Hilton’s Wheelchair Van Fund at Floyd Methodist Church (Floyd VA)
a sale at Moses Chrevrolet (Saint Albans WV) for the Saint Albans High School Lady Dragons Lacrosse Team
a sale for the 7th/8th grade formal (dance) at the Concord Lake STEAM Academy (a charter school in Kannapolis NC)
a “car wash, bake sale, hot dogs & balloon battle!” for The Well ministries in Landrum SC
Another regional benefit-sale event. I was reminded of a type of benefit-sale event that I was familiar with from childhood: church strawberry festivals (usually featuring strawberry shortcake, with some other light foods, plus some games), typically in June. These were common in the area I grew up in; the strawberry festival at my home church — Advent Lutheran in West Lawn PA — was a regular June celebration for me and my friends.
(#2) The current building at 16 Telford Ave., a few blocks from the house I grew up in (70-80 years ago); the church building has been substantially enlarged and renovated, but it’s still in the same place it’s been since 1928, when it served a primarily German-speaking congregation
In California, where I live now, strawberry festivals seem to be essentially commercial events in strawberry-growing areas. But the strawberry festivals of my childhood, which still flourish, were church socials. I was startled to discover, this morning, that they too appear to be largely geographically restricted: they’re common in the northeast and upper midwest (stretching at least a bit into Canada), rare elsewhere. A sampling of church strawberry festivals (all at Christian churches, but at a wide variety of these):
First Church of Christ, Congregational in North Conway NH
First Parish Church United in Westford MA
St. Isidore Catholic Church in Macomb MI
Messiah Lutheran Church in Sykesville/Eldersburg MD
St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Niagara-On-The-Lake ON
South Jackson Community Church in Jackson MI
(Catholic) Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Chappaqua NY
(Episcopal) Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis IN
CW/HT meets the church strawberry festival. A connection between the two social customs: as it happens, strawberry festivals often sell hot dogs. (Like pizza and hamburgers, hot dogs unite Americans in food.) The poster for the 2024 strawberry festival at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Chappaqua NY:
(#3) Hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill! As you will see, these events have expanded hugely from the simple church social, though strawberry shortcake is still at least symbolically the central feature of the occasion
October 23, 2024 at 10:16 am |
The regional phenomenon of the C.W.H.D is as unfamiliar to me as it was to you. The first thing that popped into my head, reading that strip, was an image of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile entering a mechanical car wash.