Back in 1937, there was a hot dog man who parked his red and yellow cart on the southwest corner of 87th, in front of the construction site for the new Art Deco building at 565 West End Avenue. He would always stop me a couple of feet away to watch and he would frown and tell me to back off. I never bought anything. My mother had told me that he kept his hot dogs under his bed at night and that if he ate one I could get infantile paralysis.

I couldn’t believe it keeping her hot dogs under the bed, but infantile paralysis had us all scared. We knew it was contagious, but not how or what, so everything was under suspicion. If you picked up a dime off the sidewalk and someone yelled “Infantile paralysis!” you would drop it and blow on your fingers to get rid of germs. Three kids on our block had had it; one was dead, the other two were crippled, like President Roosevelt, who had to use a wheelchair.

The aroma of onions and sauerkraut wafting in all directions led me to the corner where the hot dog man parked his cart almost every day. Although I couldn’t eat them, I liked to see them being eaten by delivery guys or construction men. They’d order “a sausage” or “a dog” and the hot dog man would get out a napkin, open the sliding glass door of the cabinet on top of his handcart, stick his two-pronged fork into a roll, scoop it up. drank. side out, place on napkin, open with fork, open lid of your metal pot, pierce hot dog, place on open roll, twist pot closed, put down fork and lift top of pot of mustard next to his car. The mango had a spreader that was inside the pot and he would spread mustard, drop the spreader back into the pot, take the fork from him and ask, “sauerkraut or onions?”

That was my favorite part. He had eaten grilled hot dogs at Nedick’s and at Chock Full O’ Nuts, where “nothing was ever touched by human hands.” I had them at the 89th and Broadway stand and later had Harry Stevens’s hot dogs at the Polo Grounds, where the term ‘hot dog’ originated, but I never got to have one with sauerkraut or with onions in red sauce from the way the hot dog man served them. The sauerkraut and onions were inside the same pot as the sausages but under a different lid: the sauerkraut in a cylindrical container, the onions in a rectangular tray. The hot dog man put on one or the other, spread more mustard, and handed the hot dog on the napkin to the customer, who sprinkled with salt or red pepper from shakers on a rack. Most would also buy a skinny bottle of root beer, sarsaparilla, grape, orange or lemon and lime from a container of melting ice. I think hot dogs are ten cents, sodas are five cents.

Sometimes a delivery man or construction site man would see me standing there looking at the hot dogs and offering to buy one. He just shook his head, too embarrassed to answer. It was during the Depression, and I knew they thought I was a poor, hungry kid. I didn’t want to tell them that my father was a doctor and that we had a lot of money and that if one of his patients couldn’t pay him, at Christmas they would give us Virginia ham or bake us a cake. Most of all, she didn’t want to have to tell them that the hot dog they were eating could give them infantile paralysis.