There used to be an A & W Root Beer restaurant on Grand Avenue. It isn’t there anymore. It was right across Grand from Young’s Giant Food, which isn’t there anymore, either.

But when I was little, this was high living: My sister, Roberta, would take Mom and me and later little sister Sally to the A & W in her 1961 Pontiac Ventura.

I believe that it was dangerous to drive a 1961 Pontiac Ventura in the San Diego area. Fighter jets from the Naval Air Station might mistake it for an aircraft carrier and try to land.

But a car that size was made for drive-in meals.

They had car hops, teenaged girls, at this A & W, and I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that they were on roller skates. They’d glide out to take your order and then glide back to place it. They’d hook a tray to the driver’s side door and, with great dignity, roll out again to lay the feast thereupon. It was Roberta, since she was driving, who distributed the goodies.

The smell, of burger and bacon and fries was unendurable. Roberta was never fast enough for me. Many years later, I saw the film Reefer Madness. At one point, one of the hopelessly addicted 1940s teenagers blurts “I NEED SOME REEFERS!” I was like that, but it was with hamburgers.

My invariable order: A root beer freeze, a Teen Burger (bacon and cheese, then a novel innovation) and fries. It was a substantial meal and required a nap afterward.

Alas, my cardiologist would whip me with a stethoscope if I ate a meal like that today.

But it was a different America then. We had big cars like Pontiacs–eleven miles per gallon, thank you very much–so immense that they were mobile dining rooms, and we had vast and limitless cattle ranches devoted solely to Teen Burger production. There would always be plenty of gasoline, we believed, and you could always eat plenty of hamburgers.

Then they shot the president and the whole shebang started to unravel.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: So it goes.