by Bill Geist
Wouldn’t you know it, a guest called the front desk to complain about the noise. The next morning all paying guests on that floor checked out, as did Glen’s wife. Last anyone heard, she was living in a small bungalow in California, but living.
Another instance involved state liquor inspectors. During the dinner hour, two of these plainclothes liquor cops came in and observed a waitress placing cans of beer in the ice maker. This was said to be illegal, but why? And do we really need to pay these guys to make absolutely sure we’re drinking warm beer? Where were the framers of our Constitution on this one?
The inspectors went into the kitchen to announce they were shutting down the dining room. Glen begged to differ. He picked up his trusty butcher knife, wielded it, and chased them out of the kitchen, the dining room, the lodge, and the parking lot. Never saw or heard from them again. It was the Ozark way.
Other times, the altercations had to do with employee relations. “I witnessed, more than once, Glen going after [desk clerk] Jim Robinson,” said Ina Kay, a waitress. “Jim used one of those big metal trays as a shield like a gladiator in a Roman battle. One of those times Jim got in a shot himself and coldcocked Glen near the lobby fireplace. Glen lay there unconscious practically the whole night.” Turned out Glen was unconscious an estimated 10 percent of the summer.
Boofie Sinclair operated the Jayhawk Cafe on campus in Lawrence, Kansas, and spent summers cooking at Arrowhead. He drank copious amounts of Ten High, every day. He was a funny, spunky, pugnacious guy who once very nearly got into a fight with Wilt Chamberlain, a tall student-athlete at Kansas who called to tell him he’d forgotten his hat at the Jayhawk and told Boofie to bring it to him.
That may have been the only time that anyone said “no” to Wilt, who then said he was coming right over to get his hat and to kick Boofie’s butt—no small threat coming from a giant. “How will I know you?” Boofie asked the world-famous seven-footer. Luckily Wilt, with his busy superstar’s schedule, never found time to drop by.
Jim Murphy, who married Boofie’s daughter, Sandy, a waitress, was a cook who drank scotch and water from goldfish bowls at staff parties.
Bill Tillman, a hurdler on the Kansas track team, was not what you’d call an alcoholic, but he worked in the kitchen, always with a beer in his hand. At a staff party on Horseshoe Bend he was egged into trying to jump over a Volkswagen. He did, but slipped on wet grass when he landed and broke his wrist. When a doctor put his wrist in a cast, Bill had him fashion a custom indentation that would hold a beer can.
Annie Hicks was the hardworking head cook. She always wore newly stained kitchen whites and always had a cigarette in her mouth. Sara worked in the kitchen and still pictures Annie mixing salad in a huge bowl with her hands and arms, a bit of her cigarette ash falling from time to time into the salad. No one complained.
Alcoholism may have skipped a generation in Annie’s family, leaping o’er her and making a direct hit on her son, Howie. He showed up one day, a bus dropping him off right in front of the lodge. Annie was surprised to see him.
He said he’d been working for NASA on “the moon project,” but had to quit because he had heart surgery. Using Annie’s pull in the kitchen, Howie was hired and made a smooth transition from the Apollo program to dishwasher.
He chose not to party with the help. Rather Howie went on his own to bars that catered to locals. For a variety of reasons related to alcoholic beverages, Harry landed in the Miller County jail in Tuscumbia on several occasions. When he didn’t show up for work for a couple of days, Ed would dispatch Pete to spring him.
Pete would drive up to the jail in Ed’s big white Caddy convertible, top down, creating quite a stir in the small town. Was Howard Hughes or Elvis or Marilyn Monroe in their local jail?
Pete let folks wonder. He smiled and waved and walked inside, posted bail for Howie, and was directed to cells in the basement. And there was Howie all right, his cell unlocked and the door open, a forerunner of the minimum-security confinement concept that would later become popular throughout the nation. It would have been a pain in the ass to go down to unlock the door to feed him three meals a day, let alone cook them. So prisoners were allowed to leave, walk up the street to the local café, charge their meals to the county, and return to jail.
Just so you don’t get the idea that they coddle criminals in Miller County, the jail cell was filthy and there was a rat or two running around.
But Glen was the chef and team leader of the kitchen drinking brigade. He led by example. When he was AWOL he could sometimes be found at the pool, not sleeping it off on a chaise lounge but completely passed out on the concrete deck, face up, arms folded across his chest, as if laid out for visitation in a funeral parlor. It was disconcerting the first time you saw it, enough to make you call an ambulance if there’d been one. There wasn’t.
This could have serious consequences. One such viewing of Chef Glen by the pool occurred just before the restaurant opened on a busy night in August.
We tried to shake him conscious: “Glen, Glen, gotta get up. Time to go to work.”
“Like hell,” he murmured, without opening his eyes, which was highly unprofessional, I thought.
“What’ll we do now?” I asked.
“Whadaya mean ‘we’?” Jim Murphy replied. “Looks like you’re the chef of the day.”
All of Glen’s backups were off that night for some reason, which was not good. Yikes! Who’s running this place? Untrained personnel would have to fill in on an emergency basis. Me and Wheez.
Wheez had worked a couple of breakfasts and was okay on scrambled (not over easy) eggs and toast. But dinner? On what was expected to be a very busy night?
My own cooking experience was pretty much limited to Kraft macaroni and cheese, which at nineteen cents a box saw me through college.
“Shitfire!” was Annie’s response when we broke it to her.
Just thirty minutes into dinner hour, the kitchen took on the air of a Civil War battlefield triage unit with hustling and bustling and bumping and yelling and spilling. Annie hotfooted about in her white apron splattered with beef juice and chicken blood that made her look like a sawbones just out of field surgery.
“Where’s my medium-rare steak order?” yelled a waitress.
“Not gonna happen,” I said, shaking my head, trying to break it to her gently. “Poor thing never had a chance.”
She looked at Wheezer for a second opinion.
“Didn’t make it,” Dr. Wheezer said. “It’s charcoal.” Dead meat. Cremated.
“Annie!” I shrieked. “Your chicken’s been in the fryer for about half an hour!”
“Shitfire!” Annie responded and searched the boiling grease for the remains.
“Hush puppies don’t go on a prime rib platter!” a waitress scolded. “And this is not au jus,” she said, pointing to a small plastic container of the brown liquid that accompanied a slice of prime rib. “It’s soy sauce. Maybe maple syrup.”
“Close enough?” I queried. She shook her head “no.”
“Jesus, Wheez, you cut that prime rib three inches thick!” I said.
“Gentleman’s cut,” he replied, laughing at what was no laughing matter.
“They asked if it was for the whole table,” said the waitress who served it. “And I think they were serious.”
“Where the hell is my lobster?” yelled a waitress. “Got a table’s been waiting almost an hour!”
“Shitfire!” remarked Annie, who was in charge of broiling lobsters.
“Pickup! You got three orders sittin’ up here!” Wheezer shouted.
“This baked potato doesn’t have any potato left inside the foil,” commented another a waitress, sounding like she was at the end of her rope on this amateur night.
“Just tell them their potato is being served PE,” said another.
“What’s ‘PE’?”
“Previously eaten,” was her answer.
“Is there a salad under that whole bottle of Thou
sand Island dressing?” Annie snapped.
“Feel free to kiss my ass!” Sarah the salad-maker retorted.
“And there’s eight shrimp on that shrimp cocktail.”
“Yeah but I only gave the last guy three,” Sarah explained.
“Is my Ozark trout up yet?”
“Don’t say ‘Ozark trout.’ Save it for the menu. It’s frozen from Germany.”
The last customer of the evening came in and ordered prime rib with mashed potatoes.
Wheezer, who had been under duress for several hours, snapped: “Mashed potatoes?! Who the hell orders mashed potatoes with prime rib?”
“We’re eighty-six mashed potatoes,” I said, adding flames to the fire. (86, in kitchen parlance, means “completely out.”)
Then, Wheezer had an epiphany, a vision of mashed potatoes, the last place he’d seen mashed potatoes. Somewhere, but where? It was here! Suddenly he flew out the back door and down the steps to the big trash barrels. He opened one. No spuds. A second, nope. But in the third Wheez struck mashed Yukon golds! He spooned some up, raced back up to the kitchen, and slapped them down on the plate next to the prime rib. The waiting waitress gave him an are-you-serious? stare but served it.
After the dinner hour had passed, one waitress summed up the evening: “We survived. But I don’t think we picked up any repeat business.”
Uncle Ed promotes Wheezer.
Chapter Nine
The Great Salad Bar Debate
Annie
The times they were a-changin’, and Annie Hicks didn’t want any part of it.
“Shitfire” (her favorite expression), said old, gray-haired Annie, wearing her besmirched white apron, leaning on a kitchen counter, a cigarette dangling from her lips. “Glen brings some of the craziest durned ideas back from California.”
Annie was his sous chef, if you will, who for years worked long days on her feet in Arrowhead’s kitchen and showed it. She was in the back, doing food prep most of each day, then cooking lobsters and fried chicken during dinner hours.
“One time his big idea was ‘broasted’ chicken,” Annie told me. “I said, ‘Glen, what in the goddamned hell is broasted chicken?’
“We was always knowed for good chicken,” said Annie, who spoke in the Ozark hills vernacular. “And I didn’t see no need to mess with it.” It was also something of a slap in the face to Annie, who cooked all the chicken.
Glen told her that “broasted” chicken was the hottest new thing to hit the West Coast. “He thinks any crazy newfangled thing they come up with in California is the cat’s vagina,” Annie said.
“You mean the cat’s meow?” I asked.
“Glen always says ‘vagina,’” she replied, although she may not have known what the word meant. “Pete told me it was ‘cat’s vagina.’”
Glen was a wordsmith, all right, who’d recite poetry, largely to himself, but loud enough for the rest of us to hear, while he toiled in the hot kitchen. One of his favorites:
May the bleeding piles torment you,
May corns adorn your feet.
May crabs as big as cockroaches crawl around your balls and eat.
And when you’re old and feeble, and your mind’s a total wreck,
May you fall right through your asshole,
And break your goddamned neck.
Beautiful Glen. Hate to admit this, but I laughed. I was no poetry scholar, but I thought it was pretty good.
And in the early sixties, it did seem all things new and exciting were emanating from Southern California. Everybody was moving there or acting as if they had. Kids in landlocked Iowa were listening to the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA,” wearing baggies and black Connies (low-cut Converse All Stars), and dyeing blond sun streaks in their hair. It was, like, totally gnarly. (They weren’t wearing “huarache sandals” like the song said, because they’d ask for “Archie sandals” and storekeepers didn’t know what they were talking about—didn’t know what huaraches were either for that matter.)
So, Annie, what culinary advance, what revolutionary concept in dining had Glen smuggled out of California this time?
“He called it ‘the salad bar,’” she said. “Never heard of it. What the goddamned hell’s a salad bar?” Her first question to Glen was the same one she’d posed about broasted chicken.
“Glen said it was like a buffet but only for salad,” Annie said, recounting their at times testy Q and A re: salad bars.
Annie just plain didn’t get it.
A salad buffet? Back then folks could only think of a couple salad ingredients. You had your lettuce, dressing, maybe some tomato.
“People go to the salad bar and make their own salads themselves,” Glen explained.
“What do you mean ‘make their own salads’?”
“Just what I said,” Glen had replied.
“Why would any damned fool want to do that?” Annie queried. “What’s wrong with salad the way it is?”
“Because,” Glen had answered, “you can make it just the way you like it at a salad bar. In California they’ve got lettuce, cherry tomatoes, radishes, carrots, chickpeas, beets, croutons, cucumber, olives, broccoli, green pepper, cauliflower. They grow everything right there.
“Oh,” Glen continued, “and hard boiled eggs, chopped up bacon, cottage cheese, potato salad…”
“So you’re a-tellin’ me folks got to get up out of their seats at their table and go make their own salads?” Annie asked in disbelief
“That’s it,” Glen replied.
“Well shitfire,” she told him. “The whole idea of goin’ out ta eat is so’s other people do the work for ya. Do ya give ’em a dollar off for makin’ their own salads?”
“Nope,” she recalled him saying. “In California they think it’s fun. Something different instead of the same old thing.”
Apparently, Glen had done a heap of thinking on this subject, salad bar psychology. Which was not really like him.
He told Annie something to the effect that people in California want to be individuals, do their own thing, make their own salads. Not just eat the salad put in front of them and in front of everybody else everywhere they eat.
“Was that what he was saying?” I asked.
“Somethin’ like that,” Annie answered.
“It sounds as though he stopped just short of saying the Bill of Rights guarantees citizens the right to pursue happiness by making their own salads, their way.”
“It’s stupid,” she said. “What next? A wash-your-own-dishes bar? And what’s to keep some big fat guy from eatin’ everything on the salad table?”
“Small plates,” Glen said. “And you put up signs: ‘No Sharing’ and ‘No Seconds.’”
“You’d have to keep a close eye on ’em,” Annie cautioned.
Glen said he’d maybe have Noble, the muscular handyman at the lodge, monitor the situation. Glen wound up asking Noble to build him a salad bar. Noble didn’t want to and kept putting it off, putting it off.
Over time, Janet caught wind of Glen’s big idea and nixed it. “I didn’t want our waitresses having to explain the whole concept and procedures to customers,” she said. “I didn’t want customers wandering around the dining room. I didn’t want to take out three tables to make room for the damned thing. And I didn’t want to see Noble tackling customers who went back for seconds, with dressing and lettuce flying all over the place. With him, a rule’s a rule.”
“This ain’t California,” Annie reminded Glen. “This is Missour-a.”
* * *
Years later I was involved in just such a situation during a family reunion in Indianapolis. We were all staying in a Holiday Inn with a country farm–themed restaurant where waitresses wore old-fashioned blue gingham dresses, old farm implements hung on the walls, that sort of thing.
I went down to the restaurant, where there was a breakfast buffet with a small sign: “No Sharing.” I joined my sister-in-law, Sharon, who’d already been through the buffet line and was sitting in
a booth. As we talked, I nibbled on a slice of her bacon.
A white-haired, grandmotherly waitress sidled up to me, bent down, and said softly in my ear: “I seen what youse a-doin’, you little shit-ass.”
Chapter Ten
Ozark Bellhops
There may have been “no surprises” at the Holiday Inn down the road but, oh boy, there were surprises at Arrowhead Lodge, all right, with amenities and features unexpected and often unappreciated in these Ozark hills.
At Arrowhead, guests checking in were asked questions they weren’t prepared to answer: “Do you prefer the American Plan or the European Plan?”
“What?” they’d reply, and I’d explain that one plan includes meals and the other does not, without confessing that I myself wasn’t sure which was which since no one ever chose the one that did.
We didn’t ask if they’d be paying with cash or a credit card, because there really weren’t any credit cards. Not yet, leastwise not around these parts. (“You mean to tell me you just sign your name and they give you stuff?”)
Puggy, the chief desk clerk, would next say, “Billy, our bellhop, can help you with your bags,” and they might reply: “Billy our what?”
Bellhops. In the Ozarks?
“I can handle them myself,” they’d say, or words to that effect, but usually too late, after Puggy had handed me their room keys so they couldn’t gain access without me.
The keys themselves added to their state of confusion. Aunt Janet, tired of replacing room keys that parting guests forgot to return, had attached them to full-sized rubber tomahawks adorned with feathers.
By this point, the guests were rattled. For most this was their first interaction with a bellhop. We were probably the only ones between St. Louis and Kansas City. We wore uniforms of sorts: white shirts that we’d spray starched and ironed ourselves—hence the occasional brown burn marks of a rookie. Worn with black pants and black bow ties, the outfits weren’t elaborate to be sure but enough to suggest that we were hotel employees, not members of some luggage-snatching gang that hung out in lobbies, as some guests suspected.