At the start of the summer of 1973, the year after my parents sold our hotel where I worked every summer from the time I was 11 to 16, I needed a job. When the new owners of the hotel called our house to ask where the switches were to turn on the lamp posts on the sidewalks, I said would work for them as a handyman which is what I had done at the hotel, among other things, for two summers. I did have the capacity to fix many things, especially plumbing, and I knew the physical plant of the hotel. But they wouldn’t pay me the $125 a week I asked for so I need another alternative.
Since I had some experience in the dining room and my cousin and some of her and my friends worked at Howard Johnson’s I applied for and got a job there. My official title was HOJO Girl #19 but thankfully I could wear black and whites and a bow tie instead of one of the blue and white checked dresses.
It was the worst place I have ever worked and certainly the most sexist and racist.
I’m not going to say much the job itself. If you have worked in a restaurant like this—and everyone should for at least a time—you know what it’s like. When the restaurant is empty, it’s boring as hell. When a bus pulled in or dinner time rolled around it was far too busy and you spent a few hours running fast to keep up. While many of the guests were quite nice, 20 to 25% of them were so demanding or nasty that serving them was unpleasant. Kids were often running underfoot–which is absolutely the scariest thing if you are a waiter. And the tips were just terrible—maybe averaging 8-10%.
But I really want to talk about is the sexism and racism of the place.
The racism was obvious in my first 5 minutes there. Like many restaurants at the time, the kitchen staff was made up of almost all Black men from the chefs and kitchen men to the dishwashers. Except for the lead chef, they were all paid minimum wage and got no tips. The waiters and waitresses were all white and while also paid minimum wage, they did receive tips.
The sexism took a little longer to grasp—about two days. There was a group of older women who were year round waitresses. (The young people were all hired for the summer, which in our resort community, was far busier than the rest of the year.) I thought of these women as old but they probably were in their forties and fifties, younger than I am now. They were about my mother’s age. But like many people who have been doing draining physical labor most of their lives—and had children and in some cases husbands they took care of after work—they looked far older than their years, at least than the their years as lived by upper middle class people. They worked long hours inside and were paler and more drawn looking than my mom and her friends.
They also were damn good at their work. The had been doing it for a long time and knew all the tricks of the trade. And they were nice enough to share them with us newbies and also with the manager and assistant manager who young men about 25 and 19 years old.
Those managers needed the help. They were shuffled in and out pretty quickly and had stepped into their jobs without doing a lot of work in this or any other restaurant. So they had almost no clue about how to do their jobs. They were constantly asking the long-serving women waitresses how to do things, from where the back-up supply room was to how to arrange the stations on the floor to how to schedule employees given the likely times we would be busy or not. And of course, they relied on the established women waitresses to train us new ones as well
Why weren’t the waitresses, who knew what they were doing and who were de facto running the place promoted to be managers? The answer is obvious—they were women.
And as if to add insult to injury, none of those established women waitresses were ever promoted to hostess—a job that was less physically demanding than waiting tables, that paid more, and that got tips from the waitress. Who got those jobs? Younger, prettier women—who then had to fend off the managers.
I was not the most woke person when I was 17 years old. But one would have to be absolutely and totally asleep to not recognize how racist and sexist this restaurant was. And seeing it there, I began to notice how much Howard Johnson’s in Liberty, NY was not unusual among restaurants or other retail establishments.
A few weeks into my work at HoJo’s I was growing increasingly angry at how horrible the work and the place was. And then I got a call from the family that bought our hotel. They were growing increasingly desperate to have someone who understood the physical plant they had bought and offered to meet my salary demand. I hesitated a bit because I was making more money at HoJos. But I told them I would think about it and give them an answer in a week.
Two nights after, I was working in the evening. I brought an ice cream sundae to table only to get a complaint that the ice cream was very soft. I went back to the ice cream freezers and realized that one of the two was running badly and the ice cream in it was melting.
I immediately went to look for a manager. I walked back to the kitchen and saw the 19 year old assistant manager whose name was Bill Boyd. I said to him, “Bill, there is a problem with one of the ice cream freezers…” He cut me off and said, pointing to one of the Black dishwashers, “His name is Bill. My name is Mr. Boyd.”
One of the things that growing up as a financially secure middle class white male gives one is a strong sense of what some would call pride and others call entitlement. And, while I don’t remember how to say this in Yiddish any more, one of my grandfather’s favorite sayings is something I still say sometimes, “My mother didn’t bring me up to be talked to like that.”
So I responded, “Fuck you, Mr. Boyd.”
He said, “This is your last night.”
And I said, “No, this is my last minute.” I had a full station so I took the checks for the five tables and put them on the dishwashing rack and walked out.
A few hours later some friends and I went to the diner next door, where the HoJo staff used to go to eat after work. As I walked in, I saw most of the HoJo staff there, including the established waitresses I’ve talked about. I was afraid they would be mad at me for walking out and leaving them with 5 tables without a waiter.
But instead, they gave me a pretty rousing ovation. Individually they told me how pleased they were that someone had told off the insufferable Bill Boyd.
I realized then that my privileged position allowed me to do something they couldn’t do. I had another job lined up and, while I needed the money for college, I could afford to get paid a little less to leave that miserable job. They had children to take care of and could not leave it or push back against abuse as I did.
That was the final, very important lesson I learned from this episode. I realized that I could and should use my privileged position, and the great education I was getting then, to fight for people, especially women and Black people, who could not always do so themselves or could not do so with some help.
So that job at HoJo’s really did shape my life.