“Fry up an oyster, boys, my top lip grows cold.
Fry up an oyster, boys, these streams are lined with gold.”
-Miner’s song, traditional.
“Had you told me, Jeremiah “Jack” Jackie Johnson, a ramblin’ Okie hobo, that I’d one day be wearing a mink shawl and sporting a fried oyster moustache, well sir, I’d have ask you to pinch me, for I would assume I was in the midst of a beautiful, corn likker-induced hobo dream. But that’s what California did for us, it made our hobo dreams come true.”
-From “Golden Hobo: The J.J.J. Johnson story.” 1876.
Upon striking gold in the California hill country, the typical 19th century prospector would head to the local food-stachery and order the priciest food moustache available, which, at 49 cents per shellfish, was inevitably the fried oysterstache. Word of a land where man could arrive one morning with little more than a shovel and the will to work and be sporting a 49-cent oysterstache by evening spread rapidly throughout the country, and soon the gold rush was on, as hundreds of thousands of so-called “49ers” left the crowded confines of the Eastern U.S. for Northern California.
While refrigeration and modern transportation have made the oysterstache far more pervasive, its rarefied and noble origins remain. Wear it proudly when the air turns cool.
Caveat Geritor: Beware the scallopstache being sold as an oyster moustache. Some unscrupulous 'stache merchants have been known to pass this fool’s gold miner’s 'stache off on the unsuspecting.
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