This Union Pacific menu is from what I’ve been calling the Modern series but really should be called the Moderne series. This series of menus, of which I’ve documented just five, used the same photos and text of the Art Nouveau series that preceded it but with a much cleaner overall design. For example, this one uses the same front and back photos and back text as this 1928 menu.
Click image to download a 1.9-MB PDF of this menu.
This particular menu had breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the University of Idaho football team on their way home from playing UCLA in Los Angeles. The game took place on November 30 and the menu was for December 1, so they must have gone overnight on the Southern Pacific from Los Angeles to Portland. UCLA won the game 13-6 before an audience of just 5,000 people, the smallest attendance of a UCLA football game that year–other games had as many as 78,000.
Football players in 1935 didn’t eat as heartily as you might expect. Breakfast was oatmeal, eggs, and toast. Lunch was a salad, a fruit plate, and bread. Dinner was soup, mixed olives, roast capon, potatoes and creamed corn, fruit salad, bread, and apple pie. All came with the usual coffee, tea, or milk except breakfast, which didn’t have a tea option.