Coming to America

Red Delicious and Real Coffee

"...my first impression was like Snow White."

"Well, you know, we grew up watching Dallas. We think everybody’s rich and thin. And then you come to America and you’re going 'Oh. Oh. Okay. Huh.'

But my first impression was like Snow White. I flew Eastern from New York to Atlanta, and they [gave me an apple]—I thought they had polished each apple, and I had never seen a red delicious apple before. And being given a red delicious apple, it was just amazing. You could get apples from the trees in the backyard—but they had, you know, blemishes and so forth, so anything that pristine, that was, you know, wow, amazing. And oranges, that was just Christmas. Wouldn’t get it any other time. So that was a big deal.

Remember in the '50s, even in Denmark, they still had ration cards, sugar, butter, all that stuff. Well, we don’t need that anyway, but it was still like that, and coffee also, and one Danish coffee made chicory coffee—you bought the chicory in a little half pound and you mixed it in with real coffee to stretch it. It was pretty good. Not bad. Sort of grew up liking it."

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