The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

Click the title for the link to the story.

The story in the link above has special significance to me. The summer of 1957 I was 12 and living in Wichita, Kansas. The minister at our church invited me to accompanying his wife and himself to his home in Tennessee for a month.

While staying at his parent's home in Nashville we all took a trip to Florida—my first time to travel through the deep south. As we drove through Georgia, we passed a large group of low, flat warehouses. I asked what those were for, and my friend's father, who was quite a joker, said, with dead seriousness, "That is where they store the spaghetti after harvest. It has to dry out and get hard, then they cut it so it will fit into the packages for the store shelf. Georgia is the number one spaghetti growing state in the US."

I liked spaghetti, but I had no clue where it came from. Most of the spaghetti I had eaten came out of a can, so his explanation sounded reasonable to me. Needless to say, everyone in the car had a good laugh at my expense.

That's my story and I'm sticking by it!