Tailgating: The History

It has become as firmly established an autumn ritual as Halloween or Thanksgiving, as Stephen Linn explains in his just-published The Ultimate Tailgater’s Handbook (Rutledge Hill Press, 224 pages), and it can get very elaborate indeed. Linn gives instructions on how to tailgate at every level from equipment checklists to recipes. In this excerpt he also offers an exploration of tailgating’s past.

The modern tailgate likely has its roots in college football, first played at College Field in New Brunswick, New Jersey, between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869. Local author-ities insist it was both a fine game and a fine party. The party and its basic elements, though, might have earlier origins. Two historical events in particular are worth mentioning. Each occurred only a few years before the landmark Rutgers-Princeton game, and together they speak to both the role of managed conflict in bringing people together socially and the basic American approach to a fully mobile, vehicle-based cuisine.

Consider the Battle of Bull Run in 1861. Enthusiastic Union supporters from the Washington, D.C., area arrived with baskets of food and shouts of “Go Big Blue!” to watch the opening battle in America’s Civil War. Historians generally agree this was a case of the right idea at the wrong time, war not being a spectator sport. Still, for those who attended, there was socializing and tradition, tension and excitement. And on that day there was even precedent set for future upsets by Southern teams against their Northern opponents. Most important, the incident effectively established definite boundaries and regional differences in tailgating traditions. Clearly, the idea appealed to hungry partisan supporters. They simply needed another eight years for a more limited field of battle to be created.

The second historical event evokes a debt of gratitude all tailgaters should acknowledge. In 1866 Charles Goodnight, a Texas rancher and entrepreneurial bon vivant, addressed the cowboys’ need for a rolling chow hall by transforming a U.S. Army Studebaker wagon into the first chuck wagon. The design was simple, compact, and enduring. In fact, Goodnight’s fully equipped mobile kitchen differs very little from those used by the modern tailgaters. Goodnight’s failure to foresee the need for pizza ovens and satellite uplinks in no way diminishes his contribution.

The advent of the automobile led to the democratization of prefootball partying, and the post–World War II popularity of station wagons provided both a name and a platform for the burgeoning practice. During the 1980s and 1990s tailgating took on a life of its own and turned into a social movement of sorts. As gas grills became more portable and coolers grew wheels, rows of parking spots transformed themselves into communities, some with their own names and flags. The ultimate tailgates in these lots are almost worthy of being judged along the lines of parade floats.

Did we mention the satellite dishes? There’s a good chance that the parking-lot hum you hear is from a generator powering a TV tuned to a satellite football package. And TV networks aren’t the only marketers who have leveraged this opportunity. Many people are willing to spend big for the ultimate day in the parking lot. How much? Hammacher Schlemmer, for instance, sells the Grill-and-Cooler Tailgate Set for about $3,000, and that doesn’t even include the food.

The draws that pull today’s well-equipped, well-dressed, well-fed fan to the parking lot are the same ones that drew that crowd in 1869: the friends, the party, the game. In fact, two out of three are sufficient for some fans. And probably in that order: One survey found 30 percent of tailgaters never set foot in the stadium.

Why Do We Say That?

When President Bush visited Chile last November, a state dinner at the presidential palace in Santiago was canceled at the last minute because of the U.S. Secret Service’s insistence that guests pass through metal detectors. This is standard practice in the United States, but Chileans regarded the weapons check as humiliating. “Can you imagine someone like the chief justice of the Supreme Court having to submit to an inspection by gringo security agents in order to get into our own seat of government?” someone on the guest list asked The New York Times.

The opprobrious gringo first rang in American ears during the Mexican War. As John Woodhouse Audubon, son of the ornithological artist, noted in his journal on June 13, 1849, “We were hooted and shouted at as we passed through, and called ‘Gringoes.’”

While appreciating that gringo wasn’t a compliment, Americans were not sure of its exact meaning. Nathaniel Parker Willis, a popular writer of the day, made a pass at it when he told the readers of Hurry-graphs (1851) about a book that had been published the previous year: “We shall give next week some extracts from this delightful book, ‘Los Gringos’ (which we believe is a Spanish phrase, partially of reproach, and means foreigners who are in search of adventure).” As time went on, the message started to come through more clearly. Thus Harper’s Magazine defined gringo several decades later, in 1884, as “a term of ridicule and obloquy applied to Americans throughout all Mexico.”

Americans wondered about the origin of the epithet and managed to come up with some remarkably picturesque explanations. Perhaps the most popular theory for many years was that gringo was how Mexicans heard the phrase “green grow” in a Yankee song, “Green Grow the Rushes, O.”

Putting the kibosh on the fanciful theories of amateur etymologists was the discovery that gringo had existed in Spanish for many years before the Mexican War. The earliest-known example is from the Diccionario Castellano (1786–93), by P. Esteban de Terreros y Pando. Gringo, according to the Diccionario, was applied in Málaga and Madrid to “foreigners who have a certain type of accent which keeps them from speaking Spanish easily and naturally.”

The term almost certainly derives from griego, Spanish for Greek. In its (rather late) first appearance in the Real Academia Española’s official Spanish dictionary, in 1869, “to speak in gringo” is recorded as meaning “to speak in Greek,” or to speak unintelligibly, just as we may say in English when bewildered by what someone is saying, “It’s Greek to me.”

In Spain, gringo does not have the same offensive connotations as in the New World, where it is, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “a contemptuous name for an Englishman or an Anglo-American.” But as not infrequently happens with disparaging terms, the objects of the epithet have begun to glory in it. Gay and queer are examples of words that have followed this trajectory. So now we have the Gringo Gazette (“Baja’s English Language Newspaper”); Clark’s Gringo Foods, of San Angelo, Texas; Gringo Skateboards, of Dallas; Green Mountain Gringo Salsa and Tortilla Strips, from Hume Specialties, of Chester, Vermont; and so on. Even Spanish speakers are easing up. Thus the family with whom my daughter stayed for a semester in Costa Rica occasionally referred to her affectionately as la gringuita.

In the end the career of gringo is another demonstration of the truism that the meanings of words depend a great deal on context—on exactly who says what to whom, when, how, and in what tone of voice. Words are like bottles. Their shapes may remain the same, while their contents vary from very bitter to very sweet.

—Hugh Rawson

L.A. Observed

The novelist Joan Didion at home in 1974.

(©BETTMAN/CORBIS)

As early as 1925 Aldous Huxley described Los Angeles as “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis,” and many people not native to the city still tend to see it as a vast incoherence, sun-dazzled and a little sinister. As a child growing up in New York City, Ben Stiller visited a Los Angeles that “smelled different, it felt different—it was fantasyland. And I loved it. I guess that might be why I moved here eventually. And of course, I grew up, and my impression of L.A. changed. It became real.” And yet it remained elusive, and Stiller began seeking the essence of his town in photographs of it. With the help of the art dealer Marla Hamburg Kennedy, he has assembled an impressive collection that has recently been published in a big, uncommonly handsome book called Looking at Los Angeles (Metropolis Books, 250 pages). Here, in the work of scores of photographers, is the city in all its contradictions: lush and sere, vibrant and desolate, the bungalow under the palm tree, the abandoned freeway curling off into nowhere. The pictures run from the 1930s to the present, and they do indeed give a powerful sense of a place not quite like any other, some of it grim, as parts of any big town are grim, and some of it very close to the fantasyland that enchanted the young Stiller.

Hoover Street in 1999.

(©BETTMAN/CORBIS)

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Late this Spring the New York Times reported on yet another controversy over John F. Kennedy’s ever-restless memory. Two writers have produced books with diametrically opposed conclusions about his most famous line. In Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, Thurston Clarke insists it was JFK alone who wrote, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” In Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, Richard J. Tofel says it was supplied by Kennedy’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen.

But whatever JFK’s immediate inspiration (which might well have included his old school’s dictum that what matters is “not what Choate does for you but what you can do for Choate”), Hugh Rawson and Margaret Miner point out in the American Heritage Dictionary of American Quotations that “the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations found a similar exhortation in the funeral oration for John Greenleaf Whittier in 1892” and that in an 1884 Memorial Day address Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said, “We pause … to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.”