Imagine attending a ballgame and enjoying a hot dog, a bag of peanuts, and a cold soda pop. Everything tastes great, but the hot dog is not made out of pork or beef but of fish. It is tuna, to be exact, and it looks and almost tastes like the classic ballpark frank. For a short time, they were available at San Diego Padres games.
At the time, the Padres were members of the Pacific Coast League and owned by C. Arnholt Smith, who also owned the Westgate Tuna Packing Company. They moved into the state-of-the-art Westgate Park, which featured 8,268 theater seats, a humidor that held 10,000 packs of peanuts under 120-degree heat, and lawn seating behind the outfield fence without advertisements. Yet, the hot dogs were probably the most peculiar innovation at the minor league stadium.
The hot dogs were made of select tuna and skinless. Fans would slab on mustard or ketchup and enjoy it like a regular dog, but Catholics could enjoy them on Fridays when they normally abstain from consuming meat products, such as hot dogs. However, where did someone get the idea of creating tuna filled hot dogs to sell at a baseball game?
According to tuna hot dog lore, the origin dates back to 1941 when William Lane attended a college football game between Loyola and Santa Clara on Friday night. He noticed a hot dog vendor having trouble selling hot dogs to a prominent Catholic crowd who did not eat meat on Fridays due to religious customs. The hot dog vendor was quoted "I have 10,000 hot dogs and no one will eat them. When are they going to invent a fish hot dog?"
However, the schools played on a Sunday afternoon at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco in 1941. They would play each other five more times before Loyola dropped its football program in 1952, and the only time they played on a Friday night was in 1948 at Gilmore Stadium, home of the Hollywood Stars of the PCL.
However, another story in Catholic Digest (December 1958) suggests that Lane read a Time magazine article on the hot dog vendor lamenting the decrease in sales of hot dogs on Friday nights.
A second article in the Catholic Northwest Passage states that the game took place in 1938, but the two schools did not face one another that fall. Whenever this game took place, there was a drop in sales of hot dogs, a whopping 37 percent decrease, even at major league baseball games. Lane would graduate from Loyola and later work as a tax counselor for a San Diego firm that served interest with Smith’s business including a tuna cannery and the Padres.
By 1952 Lane became the chief accountant for the parent corporation for Smith's tuna cannng companyand he remembered the Time article. It got him thinking of better ways to produce more product from. the tuna fish factory.. Lane began working on developing a tuna-based wiener that would have the same texture, free of cereal and artificial dyes, and look and taste like an all-meat hot dog.
He contacted a sausage maker, Curt Schirmer, who owned a sausage and meat company, and added enough hickory smoke and the right touch of spices to dissipate the fishy taste. The two entrepreneurs were backed financially by Smith and began producing the product at his cannery in late 1957.
Tunies were canned by 1959 for better shelf life and introduced to other parts of the country. There were also flavor improvements to the product and was sold in 10.5-ounce cans. There was even the prediction that it would be sold in a SPAM-like loaf and make Tunies Inc. one of the nation's major food companies.
However, the tuna-packed hot dogs appeared to fall out of favor with the rest of the country. Soon, Tunies disappeared from the shelves and for a few years, all-beef hot dogs were sold at Padres games. By 1967, production had stopped due to lack of demand.
Smith was also quoted in the same 1992 interview that Lane “worked his brains out perfecting that, but they didn’t seem to take over.” Many folks have memories of the hot dogs growing up in the area and having them for lunch at parochial schools. The ones who tasted that at the Padres games remain somewhat of a mystery. The fish-dogs have never been re-introduced to Padres games but might fit in nicely on the Petco Park menu.
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Follow all of Marc’s stadium journeys on Twitter @ballparkhunter and his YouTube channel. Email at Marc.Viquez@stadiumjourney.com
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