TONY CAPUTO’S MARKET & DELI – Salt Lake City, Utah

Most of us know someone like Lucy Van Pelt, the irascible, bossy, highly opinionated diva in the syndicated Peanuts comic strip.   Since her debut in 1952, Lucy has been the perpetrator of two long-running gags.  One involves her holding the football (ostensibly so that Charlie Brown can kick a field goal or extra point) and pulling the ball away because she doesn’t want Charlie Brown to get it dirty.  The second gag parodies the lemonade stand operated by many young children under spacious skies.  Instead of a lemonade stand, she operates a psychiatric booth where she offers advice and psychoanalysis for a nickel.  The “advice” is often worthless though on occasion, she actually dispenses a pearl of wisdom.  Lucy Van Pelt has nothing on Tony Caputo and his friends in Salt Lake City.  Every Saturday morning for years, Tony and his friends, seven sagacious septuagenarians, would meet at Tony’s eponymous deli where they’d solve all the world’s ills.  To amp up excitement in their lives, they decided to share their wisdom with people in dire need.   Caputo got a booth at the nearby farmers market where the seven could dispense their counsel.  He put up a large banner…

Relish Gourmet Sandwiches – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Jobs, Eddie Murphy, Jessie Jackson, entire NBA rosters.  Often missing from scandal sheets outing male celebrities who have fathered love children is the name of one Dagwood Bumstead.  From all outward appearances, Bumstead is an average white collar employee and loving family man with a penchant for taking naps, luxuriating in a bubble bath and constructing and consuming tall, multi-layered, poly-ingredient sandwiches of gravity defying height topped with an olive on a toothpick.  Appearances can be deceiving.  You’re reading it here first.  Dagwood Bumstead’s illegitimate son is (brace yourself) Norville “Shaggy” Rogers, a lanky would-be hipster who always seems to have the munchies.  Shaggy is a nimble contortionist with a penchant for hiding (cowering) in impossibly small places and for consuming impossibly large (Dagwood-esque) sandwiches in a single bite.  When sandwiches aren’t available, Shaggy will often tussle with his dog Scooby-Doo for pet snacks. DNA evidence hasn’t confirmed Shaggy’s paternity, but telltale (albeit circumstantial) signs seem incontrovertible.  The most telling sign is, of course, their mutual love of food. Dagwood married a woman named  Blondie, a name she shares with one of his favorite desserts (the non-chocolate brownie).  He and Blondie even named one of their children…