Nostalgia in a (Pizza Hut) Cup

I'll Tumbler For Ya

The funny thing about nostalgia is that you never know what’s going to trigger it. When you’re as nostalgic as I am and have been both collecting and writing about retro stuff for as long as I have, all the easy stuff has been checked off. Star Wars figures? Check. Happy Meal toys? Check. Old boomboxes? Check. Just when you think you’ve seen and remembered it all, something weird pops up and brings with it a bunch of nostalgia. 12 ounces, to be exact.

I worked at a slew of pizza restaurants in the 80s and 90s including Pizza Hut, Pizza Inn, and Mazzio’s Pizza so it’s possible I’m getting a few things mixed together, but at some (and maybe all?) of those restaurants, we had not only the traditional red tumblers (most frequently associated with Pizza Hut) but also green and yellow (or amber or gold or whatever you want to call them) ones as well. At Mazzio’s (and again, maybe the others) I seem to recall green cups were large (probably 20oz), red was medium (16oz) and the amber ones were small (12oz).

Everyone remembers the red cups and I spent years looking for some. It turns out, they still make them. You can go to pretty much any restaurant supply store (or eBay, of course) and still buy them. I found the two I have at a thrift store; paid a quarter each for them.

The amber ones, I’d forgotten about until yesterday when I ran across them at a yard sale. The home had belonged to a hoarder and, after her passing, her children had been left to deal with said hoard. There was a barn and a house and a bunch of tired people carrying box after box of stuff and putting it on tarps in the yard. The rain had stopped just long enough to give the mosquitos time to come out. It was muggy and muddy and no one there seemed to be having a good time.

In between stacks of “As Seen on TV” gadgets sitting in dirty, unopened boxes and outdated clothes with the tags still on them were a stack of amber glasses. I grabbed them as if I’d seen a gold nugget in a creek bed, afraid it might float away.

With those tumblers in my hand, I had an almost insuppressible desire to tell every person I saw about them. “Oh,” I imagined saying, “I used to wash glasses just like these when I worked at Pizza Hut,” I wanted to say. I carried them around like a kid with a trophy, hoping somebody — anybody — would ask me about them. “Say there,” someone might ask, “tell me about them there fancy tumblers!”

Nobody did. The people running the sale walked back and forth past me, carrying out more and more boxes of stuff.

So yeah, that’s the funny thing about nostalgia. When you don’t have it, stuff is just stuff. Boxes are just boxes and cups are just cups.