Bite-sized burgers leave giant memories

In the beginning, there was Wetson's. Growing up in the 60s and 70s on the South Shore of Long Island, that was my first taste of fast food, tucked into a prime location on Sunrise Highway by the Freeport train station. Soon afterwards, McDonald's and Burger King entered the fray and jump-started the nation's first burger wars.

Eventually the big boys crowded out most of the competition. Wetson's — gone. Jack-in-the-Box? Just a distant, lingering memory of the finest onion rings this side of the hemisphere. For a while it seemed that every fast-food burger chain would fall victim to the McDonald's/Burger King juggernaut.
   
But they couldn't kill White Castle. It must have mystified Ray Kroc and the suits at BK. While they fell all over themselves trying to copy each other with fancy-named burgers, children's toys and million-dollar ad campaigns, White Castle kept on quietly churning out their postage-stamp-sized burgers, slapped on a dinner bun, and selling them by the sackful.
   
The White Castle on Sunrise Highway by the Lynbrook station has been there since at least the 1960s, serving as a landmark for where we turned onto Broadway to visit my grandmother.
   
Usually when our family of seven went to Grandma Lily's it was for dinner, so we rarely sampled the famous belly bombers. But it was a huge treat when we did.
   
My siblings and I loved that it really looked like a castle, at least from the outside. And that steam rose from the buns when we unwrapped them. And we got a huge kick out of those five holes, apparently put there in the 1950s to help the burgers cook faster (Or was it to make the profits rise faster? They'll never tell.)
   
We loved that you could eat a whole White Castle in two bites, as if it were a delicate appetizer.
   
I haven't eaten there in a while. But the last time I did, the burgers had the same oniony aroma and greasy heft in that white paper bag that took me right back to my childhood.
   
For the past 13 years, the same White Castle has served once again as a landmark for me to turn onto Broadway, now to head to my Hewlett home. More often than not, as I make that turn I think of my Grandma and her little house on Starks Place.
   
I don't remember thinking this as a child, but I'll bet there were times, as we struggled to eat the half grapefruits with a maraschino cherry on top that began every meal at Grandma's, my mind and appetite wandered a mile away to Sunrise Highway, where the White Castle stood like a sentry and the burgers always beckoned.