When I first saw this cover on a 1950 menu, I thought it was very pretty, but I couldn’t afford it. The railroad must have had some extra stock left over when it printed this menu for a Burlington Route Veterans Association annual banquet in 1965.

Click image to download a 1.0-MB PDF of this menu.

The cover painting is signed “McCutcheon,” which refers to John Tinney McCutcheon (1870-1949). Born in Indiana and educated at Purdue, he was the editorial cartoonist at the Chicago Morning News from 1889 to 1903. He then moved to the Chicago Tribune in 1903, where his cartoons appeared not on the editorial page but the front page for forty years. Having won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his cartoons in 1931, he became known as the dean of American cartoonists.

As this cover painting indicates, not all of McCutcheon’s cartoons were political. This painting and the accompanying text were first used, the cover says, in the Tribune, probably in one of McCutcheon’s front-page cartoons. The colors were probably added by Burlington artists. Several books of McCutcheon’s cartoons and writings are downloadable from the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg.

The meal served at this banquet doesn’t look as impressive as the ones offered on board Burlington’s dining cars. The sole entrée was pot roast of beef, Jardiniere, which was probably tasty but is really just a beef stew. Yet the event was important enough that the speakers included not only Burlington President Louis Menu but Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.