CMH Gourmand – Eating in Columbus & Ohio

Welcome to the beginning of Sandwich Week. Which means, like Shark Week, etc, this may be a ploy to get the ratings up. It is a long and rambling road that got his here, so I will begin, with an explanation to how we got here and why.

Why do Sandwich Week now you might ask? Because this blog is eleven years old today. And why did I start this blog? It was not so I could serve up Sandwich Week eleven years later. The short answer is I started this because my friend A. Conway suggested I look into doing a blog. Back in the old days, they were just taking off. I was weary of this hipster, electronic method of self disclosure. A. Conway has an interesting ability to make subtle suggestions for how I might improve my lot in life which started my senior year of high school. The downside is that because he was subtle, I often missed these queues and did not recognize his hints as potentially helpful until years or decades later. A few of these nudges did fight their way through to my single-minded skull. One of the most important was suggesting I join him to learn about different committees with the Ohio Drake-Unions Activity Board. I took a shine to the Fine Arts Committee and the people I meet there became 99% of my friends in college. And unlike most other cohorts in my life, this group of friends “stuck” and have remained loyal for decades. Through this group I had many important post college experiences. Great road trips, a “camping” tradition that lasted ten years, a few girlfriends, my post college roommate and the man who I orchestrated to be the first Dudeist Minister in the state of Ohio so that I could be married by a guy wearing a bathrobe.

So in the summer of 2006, A. Conaway said something a long the lines of hey man, you might want to look into doing a blog. These are the series of events that lead up to me being in Chicago and his suggestion. In 1998, I blundered into free-lance writing and had some success with it. I even assisted in research for some popular food books. But after surviving Y2K, missing getting trapped in Ireland by 911 by a few hours and basically spending a lot of time doing a lot of things but not really making any forward movement in my life I decided to double down on a few life goals. 1) Leave my job that I decided I hated in 1995 (not so much because the job was bad but that the majority of my peers and especially superiors were wretchedly horrible humans) 2) Emigrate to Australia 3) Write a book so I could be a “real writer”.

Number one took a lot longer than I planned. My initial plan was graduate with a degree in Library and Information Science, with a focus on the information part so I could work at OCLC which had the potential of getting me to Australia some day. That did not happen. I did get the degree but not the OCLC. As it turned out, I was so focused on getting into OCLC I overlooked an important reality, there was a shortage of librarians in Australia at that moment of time which would have given me enough points to make my move. The sad thing about that job that sucked, that even though I increasingly found most of my co-workers and all of my superiors deplorable, I finally found my niche and really started to excel but I made a critical mistake, the very second I trusted “them” – they pulled a Lucy on my Charlie Brown and took the football away from me at the last possible second. That was devastating. That moment in time created a level of pure hatred that persists to this day. So that explains part of the outcome of goals one and two. During the middle of all of this I had not one, but two opportunities to write a book. The first was about the history of pizza. I had a partnership with an editor, I wrote the entire book outline and completed much of the research. But the publisher decided to go in another direction and gave the book to another team. Their book was not that good but they did manage to get on the History channel to talk about pizza. About the same time, Ed Levine released his book on Pizza which I consider to be one of the best. I was not bummed about the outcome of “book one” because at the same time I was working on the pizza book, I was asked what type of book I wanted to work on for a new publishing company that had just launched. I immediately said “regional sandwiches” and was given the green light to start after the pizza book was completed for the other company. When that fell through, I was told to “start now” and given an advance to do sandwich research. I jumped in deep to that project but had to make a hard decision. I needed to travel around the country to visit all of the sandwich spots for my book. To do that I needed money and a lot of vacation time. My sucky job had that, so I sucked it up I stopped looking for another job or trying to figure out a back door to the land down under so I could do this book right. Well, I almost gave up on that back door. I made a “hail Mary” attempt to get Down Under non traditionally, but I could not seal that deal either. And the week after I got back from that exploratory mission (my sixth trip there) I got the call from my publisher. My book project was canned because they were closing shop. I told I could to keep the balance of my advance and I would retain the rights to all of my material. That is a good deal for a company that was ending. But it was not a book. I found myself back where I started years before and my tail was very much between my legs.

It was shortly thereafter I found myself in Chicago visiting A. Conaway. He knew about the sandwich project because the previous fall I had used his house as a base of operations twice. The first time, I passed through after eating Pork Tenderloin Sandwiches in Indiana and before I started to eat Limburger Cheese Sandwiches in Wisconsin, more Pork Tenderloins in Iowa and a few others on my way back east. The second time, he drove me around Chicago while I sampled Italian Beef Sandwiches at 15 places in 4 hours. On this occasion, I was passing through on my way to Wisconsin to judge BBQ near a small town called Ellisonville. He asked about the book, and the hail mary attempt at Australia and the job I had worked so hard to get (OCLC) and I had to regrettably share that all had gone down in flames. And he said, “you might want to try a blog and use that sandwich material in it.” That is how we got here.

I never used the sandwich content in the blog, because it still stung a little….a lot, that it did not happen. After over a year of working twenty plus hours a week on this book, I could not look at it anymore. I had too much of my heart invested in it. But eleven plus years after, it does not bother me as much. Hence, we have Sandwich Week. I am dusting off old content and sharing a a few bytes of my archive of regional sandwich lore.

Thanks A. Conaway. This blog did not lead to another book, but it created countless opportunities over the last eleven years and more importantly, it connected me to many people, most of whom, did not suck. So this blog thing, was well worth doing.