by Bill Geist
Then he dropped the hammer. “Get the hell out of my hotel and don’t come back.”
Now, Ed could also turn the tables and fire the staff, all of it. Ina Kay said he once had to close the hotel for two weeks for lack of employees and never did that again.
But he would fire the same employee multiple times. Ina Kay for example.
“He fired me at least three times,” she told me, “the first time for being left-handed.” Workplace discrimination laws did not address left-handedness, not to mention there may not have been workplace discrimation laws of any kind back then. Chef Glen firmly believed that carrying trays left-handed “looked funny” and caused accidents.
“I was fired a second time for dropping a steak knife in Janet’s lap,” Ina Kay said, which Ed treated as attempted murder. The third time, Glen didn’t feel like broiling a lobster five minutes before closing time and Ina Kay had to deliver the bad (fake) news that the kitchen had run out of lobster.
“You’re fired!” Ed yelled at her. “We’re never out of anything when it comes to our year-round customers.”
She never left, a strategy that seemed to work.
You could often tell when Ed was about to go off. He would hang out in the lobby, drinking and loudly greeting people coming in for dinner. The mood was generally jovial, but when you heard him address someone as “pal” you knew there was trouble. Usually it was in response to some criticism of the hotel or an employee.
Ed would twitch and say something on the order of “If you don’t like it, why don’t you get your ass out of my hotel, pal?” Then he’d turn to skinny-ass me, skinny-ass Pete, and skinny-ass Chappell and say, “Boys, throw this joker out of here!”
The three of us would look at each other as if to say “Us?!” The joker would look at us as if to say “Them?”
At that point, there wasn’t much we could do. I had once threatened to call the police, knowing full well there weren’t any. Another time I took the malcontent aside and explained to him, sotto voce, that Uncle Ed was upset because he’d been diagnosed that afternoon with stage four brain cancer.
“Really?” said the guy, stunned by the news.
“Inoperable,” I replied.
* * *
There was upward mobility. “Somebody left and I was promoted to kitchen duty,” said Ellen. “I was thrilled. The kitchen is where all the action is, and where all the people are. I peel potatoes, make salads, wash dishes, and do whatever Annie tells me to do.
“She’s a tough old bird. One morning after an evening of drinking adult beverages, I was late to work with a horrible hangover. Annie gave me my punishment. I had to clean the grease traps beneath the sinks. The smell was overwhelming. I’ve never been late again.”
Many of the waitresses appeared no bigger, nor heavier, than the trays they carried. Such was the case with young Marilyn.
One morning as Marilyn went through the swinging kitchen door, a pitcher of warm syrup tipped and poured down her chest, “between my little boobs,” parting in three streams down each leg and into her underwear. About eight breakfasts hit the floor. “The entire dining room erupted in laughter,” she said. “I had the sweetest pussy in town.”
Marilyn! What would your mother say?
She was probably the sweetest girl around already. She even befriended the grouchy old night desk clerk, Jim Teague. “We shared eggs in the morning,” she said. “He liked yolks. I liked whites.” She drove him to Jeff City to buy shirts. “He was color-blind and needed help. He wrote me letters of encouragement while I was in college. I still have them.”
Old Teague asked her to accompany him to a room where a guest was freaking out. Teague wanted a witness. “A woman was shaking and crying and begging for ‘one more drink’ and grabbing hold of my dress and wouldn’t stop,” Marilyn said. “Noble finally gave her enough booze that she passed out and he drove her to some clinic in Kansas City.”
Fergie, who ran the gift shop and whose full name was Zoolena Ferguson, would ask Marilyn to go to Eldon to wire money to her daughter, Toolie, who had a baby girl but no father around. Marilyn did this for Fergie several times, always on the sly because Janet did not approve.
On top of everything else, the waitresses always had Glen to contend with. With a slap of a spatula he’d yell at them for making the salads or the shrimp cocktails too big: “Girls! We’re feeding these people, not trying to fatten them up for slaughter!”
And his “jokes”! He told the same ones every day, like the one that was something about a blind man walking past a fish market and saying “Ethel, is that you?” Get it?
Sexual harassment in the workplace, you say? Creating a hostile work environment? We didn’t have names for stuff like that back then. Just some real dumb-asses to put up with.
Chapter Fourteen
I Don’t Get It
The 1960s were times of change. Most places. Not so much here. And in some respects not even yet.
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders were demonstrating in the South for the right to sit at lunch counters and wherever they pleased on buses.
But Missouri is not really the South. Or North. Lake of the Ozarks had no segregated lunch counters or buses—not because Ozark folk are more tolerant, there just weren’t any “others” to be tolerant of.
There were no black or brown people that occurred naturally, or by any other means, at the lake. No blacks, no Hispanics. So it was a tough place to be racist. Telling a racist joke about them would have been like telling a joke about Reykjavikians.
Missouri was a border state. There were slaves in Missouri a hundred years before, but even then they were few and far between, especially in central Missouri, which was way too rocky and hilly to grow cash crops.
Being from St. Louis, Janet and Ed knew about racial discrimination and civil rights.
“You know what you do if black people come in?” Janet asked the table of us folding napkins before the dining room opened one evening. I held my breath. “You seat them just like anybody else. They’ll probably be testers looking to be turned away.”
And so it was, one evening when I was the desk clerk, an older black couple, best dressed couple in the Ozarks, came in for dinner. They were the only black people I saw in eight summers at the lake.
“Good evening,” I said as they walked past the desk toward the dining room.
“It’s the best evening,” the man said emphatically. “You ought to pop your head out and look at the stars.”
The hostess showed them to a table for two, a “deuce,” at the front of the dining room about fifteen feet from where I stood. A few customers did turn to look, but no murmurs swept the restaurant and no one walked out.
“How’s the prime rib?” the gray-haired man asked Marilyn, their waitress.
“Excellent,” she said. “We’re known for it.”
“It’s rich and salty,” said the woman who was with him, apparently his wife. “Your doctor wouldn’t like that choice. Bad for your blood pressure.” I think it’s bad for cholesterol too, but no one had heard of cholesterol yet.
He ordered it anyway.
“I noticed later that he was picking at it,” said Marilyn, “and so I went over and asked him if it was all right. He said ‘yes’ it was, but as I walked away I heard a loud thud. I turned around and the man had fallen off his chair and was lying on the floor.”
Someone from the next table hopped up and loosened the man’s collar and tie. We didn’t have mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, no CPR, no Heimlich maneuver, 911, no EMTs back then.
A couple of men picked him up and carried him past the desk to the nearest room, 212. His wife’s hand gripped his—their two hands firmly clasped as they must have been at the altar a lifetime ago. At first shocked and sobbing, she now bore the look of someone who knew the worst had happened. His face looked that way to me, like the faces of my grandfathers as they lay in their caskets. After they’d passed, I stood staring down blankly at the desktop. I�
��d never seen anyone die. And now the man who minutes before had smiled on his way in and told me to go out and look at the stars would be leaving, dead. I was so glad he’d seen the stars.
Someone suggested I call the proper authorities, but I couldn’t imagine who that might be. There were no hospitals, clinics, doctors, EMTs, not even a cop anywhere around here. Eventually an ambulance from somewhere arrived.
It was a busy night in the dining room and within ten or fifteen minutes, the couple’s table was reset and a much younger couple sat down for dinner. They smiled when the hostess gave them their menus.
I was shaking my head slowly from side to side, when Ed asked, “What’s the matter, Billy?” I glanced over at the table.
“Life goes on,” he said.
“I don’t get it,” I replied. Still don’t. I remember the night my dad died. I walked around the neighborhood saying “I don’t get it” over and over.
Call it “the circle of life” or “part of life” or whatever you like, but I’ve had a lot of years now to think on the subject and witnessed death and lost many friends and loved ones, and you know what? I still don’t get it.
I took a moment away from the desk to go out and get a breath of fresh air. And admire the vast, majestic, bejeweled night sky. I think it helped.
Chapter Fifteen
Night Desk
Ol’ Jim Teague, probably about seventy-five years old, was the overnight desk clerk. Came on about 9:00 p.m. He’d sit behind the front desk for about an hour, doing nothing, then move to a comfortable chair nearby where he would continue to do nothing until he dozed off.
He offered little in the way of security, but this was back when we didn’t worry a whole helluva lot about security. We didn’t have surveillance cameras, gated communities, home security systems, microwave movement detection systems, car alarms, card scanners to gain entry to work, guns on our nightstands, and politicians and security firms that tried to scare us into voting for them or buying something. Robbery of course was always a possibility, if not the probability news channels would have us believe. I don’t buy free-floating fear. I never bought The Club, that antitheft steering wheel bar I’ve seen on an old orange Pinto with a Blue Book value of an open bag of Cheetos.
One night while Teague slept, Jim Murphy and Noble Needham picked up the cash register, carried it downstairs, then woke up ol’ man Teague and asked him for change for the cigarette machine. (A pack was thirty-five cents, and boy did people bitch about that.)
“Get it yourself,” Teague mumbled.
“The register’s locked,” Jim reminded him.
Teague rose slowly and fumbled for his keys as he shuffled over behind the desk. He found the key but…no register!
“Jesus Christ!” Teague yelled. “Where’s the goddamned register?”
“You’re in deep shit,” Jim said, shaking his head. Then he and Noble burst out laughing.
* * *
Nights at the front desk were usually quiet, but did have their moments.
A young couple was spending their wedding night at the lodge when midway through it the bride came sprinting down the hall and through the lobby screaming “I married a monster! I married a monster!”—apparently not the abusive variety but the kind who makes nutty requests. As the groom checked out the next morning, alone, he was asked the standard question: “How was your stay?”
* * *
Then there was the Night of the Mad Hungry Man Last One Standing No-Holds-Barred Missouri Death Match.
Teague and I were sitting in the lobby when a loud, burly, belligerent drunk crashed through the front door, yelling “Restaurant open?” It sounded less like a question than a demand.
“No,” Teague answered, with what may have been a bemused what-a-stupid-question lilt. “It’s been closed for way over an hour.” I half expected Teague to add: “Stick around, it reopens for breakfast in eight hours.” Teague did have that grumpy old man way about him.
“We’re hungry!” the man hollered.
“Not open,” Teague said curtly.
Hungry Man, as he forever came to be known in lodge lore, grabbed frail, old Teague by the collar, pulled him to within an inch of his face and shouted, “How about now?! Now is it open?!” Then he shoved Teague hard against the wall.
I don’t like bullies, never have, a half century before it became a cause. Also, I have a temper, having always been told it’s because I have red hair. My high school buddies remind me of the time we were walking down the street and were confronted by some toughs, one of whom pulled a knife. I responded by pulling my jacket open, sticking out my rather unimpressive chest, and challenging our would-be assailant: “Go ahead! You haven’t got the guts to use it!” I guessed correctly. (Thank you, Jesus.)
Aunt Janet displayed some of her gift shop wares in the lobby, among them a large, rather heavy two-by-three-foot green plaster statue of Buddha sitting sideways on an elephant.
Unbeknownst to Hungry Man, who was still occupied with Teague and with his back turned to me, I picked up that symbol of peace, love, and harmony, and brought it crashing down on his head. This substantially loosened his grasp of Teague’s collar and sent Hungry Man slumping to the floor, stunned and momentarily unconscious.
Someone, I think it was Pete, yelled, “You killed him!” But Hungry Man stirred, came up in something of a kung fu pose, then hit the floor again before crab-walking sideways on all fours out the front door.
The next morning, Ed asked Pete, “What the hell happened here last night?”
And Pete replied: “A man came in, asked if the dining room was open, and Billy hit him over the head with a statue.” Thanks, Pete.
* * *
Occasionally, another old timer, Bud, an old friend of Teague’s, would stop in late in the evening for a cup of coffee and some reminiscing.
He’d grown up in Linn Creek, a small town nearby that had to be moved uphill or torn down, lock, stock, and barrel when the dam was built and the water came in.
He said everything between 628 feet above sea level and the 660 feet of the lake’s surface had to be demolished by fire or dynamite: houses, barns, schools, trees, churches, bank, gas station, store. All that remained were tree stumps and piles of broken concrete. “Cemeteries, too, yeah,” Bud said. “Some of the cemetery crew quit.
“People cried, watching their town go.” He said the town of about four hundred was close knit. Families intermarried. Everyone knew everyone else. “If there was a lost cow wandering through town, everyone knew whose cow it was.”
He said many people had their houses pulled up the hill to the new Linn Creek or the new town of Camdenton. He added that as the water was rising, lawyers were still working feverishly on land deals with local folk. “They’d taken over the biggest house in town for their offices and when they moved it uphill the lawyers just stayed in there working.” Bud chuckled.
Teague asked him if he’d tell me the story about his grandmother. And he said he’d be happy to.
“I was fourteen,” he said. “My folks said for me to go over and check to see how Grandma was a-doin’,” he recollected. “As I was a-walkin’ up to her house I seen a man climbin’ out of a truck who I was pretty sure I’d seen before, someplace. He was wearin’ dirty clothes. He was with another fella who was wearin’ a clean white shirt and a necktie and shiny shoes. They walk up the front steps and shiny shoes knocks on the door. Grandma answers it and the man says, ‘Mornin’, ma’am,’ he says, tippin’ his hat, all polite-like, like he was sellin’ Bibles or somethin’. ‘I’m with the ’lectric company.’
“‘Figured,’ she says, talkin’ at him through the screen door.
“‘Well,’ he says, ‘water’s risin’ and we got to get you folks safely out of here so’s you don’t drown.’
“Here he is, actin’ like he’s here to rescue people when he’s part of the cause of the whole thing. The flood.”
“‘Might as else come on in then,’ Grandma says. Man says
he can’t stay but a minute because the two of them are right busy. And they were all of that.
“The dirty clothes guy stays on the porch. Inside Grandma is tellin’ the ’lectric man I’m her grandson. He says his name and offers his hand, but I don’t take it, just give him a little nod.
“He opens his case, takes some papers out, hands ’em over to Grandma, and starts spoutin’ a bunch of mumbo jumbo about what she has to do to get the money for her house. But we can’t really follow what he’s tryin’ to say. Had the feelin’ he liked it that way.
“Grandma tells every bit of our family’s eighty years in this house—since before the war between the states. Weddings at the house, and menfolk comin’ home from wars, and the big ol’ oak tree in the front yard that she’d watched grow practically from an acorn.
“She shows ’lectric man a photograph of a man she says was my great-granddaddy, an Osage Indian, with long black hair. He wasn’t none too happy about white folk a-comin’, and he let ’em know it, Grandma says. The Osage was fierce.
“Anyways, after about a half hour of family history, there’s a rappin’ on the door and the dirty clothes guy steps inside. He’s been waitin’ on the porch, spittin’ tobacca juice over the railin’, tappin’ his foot, and swattin’ at flies. He makes no greetin’s and grunts to ’lectric man: ‘Gotta get to it.’
“‘So we got to leave now, I reckon,’ Grandma says.
“‘Water’s risin’,’ ’lectric man says. ‘Got your things ready?’
“‘We have everthin’ boxed up cause we knew you was a-comin’. We heard what you’re here to do. Most of our things are in the wagon.’
“’Lectric man helps with the loadin’, I guess to show he was halfway human.
“Grandma steps out the front door for the last time, wearing her Sunday-go-to-meetin’ dress. She pays no mind to what’s goin’ on around her, not lettin’ anythin’ bother her, the way she’d had to do her whole life, carryin’ on with a stiff upper lip, through floods, droughts, two children dyin’. She won’t give the ’lectric men no satisfaction.