Bee-Vee's

Bee-Vee's was also a place where one could go, when I was very young and the world was very small. It was a hamburger stand that was located in a small modernist diamond-shaped building next to Randall's.  I think of Bee-Vee's and Randall's together. On the sign next to the name was bee. My mom might take us there and we would get a hamburger and french fries. There was no hamburger and fries quite like the ones at Bee-Vee's. It was one of the first places I remember eating that was not Home, or at one of my grandparents' houses.

Eating out at a restaurant was a rare luxury. We never ate fast food as it now called. It was not yet a thing that people did often. Kentucky Fried Chicken was exotic. Instead there were many hamburger stands--perhaps a dozen in town, most of them down on Lincoln. I see them in the digitalized 1968 yellow pages and most of them I do not recognize. Most of them seem to be a man's name, like "Jeff's". Maybe Bee-Vee's was someone's initials.

In the 1970s America changed and the national chains started arriving in Ames. The local hamburger drive-ins run by a local proprietary close down and became rare. Bee-Vee's closed by the mid to late Seventies when we were still living in Ames . The building was torn down and became a bank. Everything becomes a bank.

Years later when I lived in Austin, I saw that in Texas, the culture of little vintage hamburger stands was alive and well. There were several next to campus. I was delighted. It was like going back in time to my boyhood.  When I traveled around the country by car in the south and southwest, I would invariably find a hamburger stand in a small town, and it was always a treat to stop there, and maybe bring a burger and fries back with me to my campsite.

Thinking about my mom stopping there to get us food on the way home from the Groc, I am overwhelmed at how it obvious it was that my mother used food as a way to make up for being a mediocre mom, in her own mind. She would get us treats", or "goodies" as she called them. Often times she would get us Hostess products, like Ho-Hos, which came in a box of ten, each one foil wrapped. My two sisters and I would fight over who got the tenth one after splitting the rest of them in three. My sister Anne would infuriate Kate and me by saving her portion in the freezer and eating them later!

It breaks my heart that my mom felt this way. On my last visit to her in 2017, I spent time telling her how wonderful she was as a mother. She thought her whole life she was supposed to be something more than that. She believed in the propaganda that being a wife and mother wasn't good enough for a woman. So many women of her generation fell for that lie.

Like many women of her time, she thought she had to be her father, the war hero and the college professor, whom she worshipped. She tried to do that during her adult life and never pulled it together. My father too believed that he failed at the things he tried to do, which was provide for us in any more than a meager way.  That was just who they were. I have so much compassion for them.

"You were a wonderful mom," I told her, while we sat in the little apartment she rented in Fort Collins her final days after my father died. 

"For the vast majority of people who walk the Earth, who live and die---both men and women---having kids and raising a family will be what they do, the thing they leave behind," I told her.

I failed at that and I can't much forgive myself for it, but that's a different story for another time. For the rest of us, we try to find a way to give to the world, to future generations. Some of us can do that. Others of us struggle for that as well.

It looks so beautiful to me for so many reasons. I found this photo off a Facebook post by the Ames Historical Society. According to the post, Bee-Vee's operated from 1964 to 1977. Note the name was "Bee-Vee" but everyone called by the possessive name. Below the post were comments of other people who had fond memories of it.
"Would stop there as a little girl when at dance classes at Barbara Jean Van Scoy's Dance Studio nearby. Was easily amused with watching the buns being toasted and then slide down the dispenser, ready to assemble burgers."