We came this close -- this close! -- to snack genius

This is the true tale of how two adolescent boys spent a summer quite a few years ago on a farm in the Ozark hills over yonder.

When I say it's a "true tale" I mean it. But I'll confess right now that my memory plays tricks on me, so if anything I tell you isn't plain fact I hope you will be compassionate. I wouldn't want anyone to say, "He cooks on a dirty grill, and fibs, too."

During this particular summer in the mid-1950s, of which I am telling this story, my city cousin came to the farm on Killough Valley for a couple of weeks. We found plenty to do: Hiking over the forested hills to the river to fish and explore caves and drink from clear, cold springs. Climbing trees and carving our initials into the bark high enough no one would ever see them again. Picking blackberries for my mother to bake a cobbler. Scouring the dry creek bed for rocks encrusted with quartz -- or Missouri diamonds, as we called them. Shooting bullfrogs in the ancient pond next to the falling-down cabin everyone called the Old Slave House, one of two such houses, little more than shanties, on the farm, which, we were told, was later owned by a former slave. Making forts in the barn loft from bales of hay, even though it was hotter than a baker's oven. We didn't mind, because my mother would take us to the lake to swim until the skin on our fingers wrinkled.

And this particular year was the summer we -- my cousin and I -- invented Fritos.

This was pre-television, mind you, and the Ward's Supermarket in my favorite hometown didn't sell corn chips, so we had no way of knowing that a fellow in San Antonio, name of C.E. Doolin, had begun selling a corn snack in 1932 that he called Fritos.

Never mind.

Let's stick with my true tale.

It was late enough in the summer that the corn we had planted had ripening ears about ready to harvest and be ground into feed for hogs and cattle.

My cousin and I picked some ears of corn whose kernels were almost as hard as those Missouri diamonds we displayed on the concrete cover that went over and around the hand-dug cistern outside the kitchen door at the rear of the farmhouse. The concrete also provided a comfortable seat and a place to crush the corn with hammers from the nearby tool shed.

I don't know what we intended to do with the corn, but soon the kernels were smashed into something resembling corn meal. My mother found an old frying pan she didn't need anymore, and she suggested we mix our coarse ground corn with a bit of melted Crisco and some salt and try cooking it on the outdoor grill we had built from concrete blocks and an old cast-iron gate.

So, my cousin and I built a fire in the grill, waited until the blaze settled down into coals and put the frying pan with our magic batter on the cast-iron gate.

Then we took off for the patch of woods next to the big pasture where grapevines stretched up 30 feet or more into the branches of a huge oak tree, making a great natural swing, provided you could hold on long enough and the vine didn't snap in mid-swing.

That was OK. A broken arm now and then was the price you paid to have fun before e-games and videos took over the lives of our young generation.

When we got back to the house for supper, several hours had passed. My mother asked how our "cornbread" turned out. We had plumb forgot about it. We ran to the outdoor grill and found a thin, crisp layer of cooked ground corn in the pan. It lifted out and broke into bite-size pieces. We double-dared each other until one of us took a bite.

Guess what? It was good. Crunchy. Salty. Corny.

By then, the fireflies were starting their evening show, so we ran around the yard catching them and putting them in a Mason jar. Our short-lived excitement over the corn snack was only a memory.

It was several years later that my cousin and I tasted our first Fritos, he in St. Louis and I at home on Killough Valley after my mother bought a bag at Ward's.

You can imagine what went through our minds when we realized this is exactly what we concocted one summer.

If only we had ... .

What? Realized that we had created a snack that already was in mass production in a place called San Antonio?

Who knew?

Looking back, I suppose our experience with the ground corn was a bit like all of you who buy lottery tickets and come this close -- this close! -- to winning.

We could have been the world's snack kings, my cousin and I. But we're not.

You can decide how close we came.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.