What a fun thread. I just have to laugh now when I hear complaints from the kids these days about tour food with all those big semi food trucks out in the parking lot. The only real food truck I ever remember seeing was SCVs, while the rest of us were being fed out of the back of a U-Haul.
I can remember it like it was yesterday; standing in the parking lot at Stillwater as SCV came rolling in with those 4 new Silver Eagle busses and an honest-to-God food truck. We were a relatively new corps without any history of regional or common rival corps. Quite to the contrary, most of us had grown up in the 70's traveling great distances to see and admiring all the corps with whom we now found ourselves surrounded in competitive company. That being said, it was always easy to be jealous of SCV and all their evident luxuries: new uniforms, horns, busses and that ###### food truck.
Ms. Margaret Collins and her crew did feed us very well with the U-Haul, hot plates and plenty of canned goods. Somewhere along the line she also managed to convince some governmental agency that with our non-profit youth organization status we were eligible for government rations. I don’t think she managed to get food stamps, but we did have plenty of ‘gubment cheese and peanut butter. Our standard after the show snack was a cheese ‘sammich (dry, no mayo); big hunk of cheese between two slices of white bread, choked down with water (or, if lucky, watered down Tang) in dixie cups from the igloo cooler kept on the bus. I had more cheese that summer than a Frenchman working in a government ammunition factory.
Seems to me we also had a lot of some sort of beef stew, usually followed with fruit cocktail. She was also conscientious enough to make sure we had a banana every couple of days to keep our potassium levels up. The thing I was most grateful of, even though we were a bunch of kids she still made a big pot of coffee every morning for those of us that were old enough to NEED it.
Miss Margaret fed the corps on into the 80’s, even after her daughter aged out, and earned the designation “Loaves-and-Fishes” for her ability to feed the corps well with limited resources.