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AT the All-Star Game tonight at Yankee Stadium, fans will, as they tend to do at baseball games, eat hot dogs. These hot dogs will probably arrive encased in foil. They will be sanitary. They will meet every possible health standard. And they will bear little resemblance to the hot dogs I sold long ago at another legendary New York ballpark, Ebbets Field.

While I’m guessing the $5-plus hot dogs at Yankee Stadium come out of spotless, industrial kitchens, the 20-cent franks I hawked in the mid-1950s had a slightly different provenance. They were taken from a vat of rapidly cooling water — it had been boiled at one point — in a kitchen under the stands. They were then packed into iron trays that my fellow white-suited vendors and I would lug around the grandstand. We also carried a box of rolls, mustard in an open plastic container and a large fork to spear the hot dogs. If the fork or the mustard stick fell on the ground, no problem — you wiped it off with your handkerchief. The water that the hot dogs were sitting in would often turn mustard-colored in the tray, and on hot summer days you’d be sweating into it.