Tip Your Waiter
Emerson Stone ’45
I recall the dining hall in the mid-forties as a place of jumbled conversation and meals toted from the adjoining kitchen to the shiny, circular, oak tables by us schoolboy waiters. May Cotter, unobtrusive and eagle-eyed, stood at the head of the room next to a serving table, awaiting the next inevitable dining room disaster. I clearly recall when one arrived.
In those times, despite warnings, each waiter tried to load his oval aluminum tray higher, heavier, and more precariously than anyone else. The idea was to make it look casually easy to hoist a single tray freighted with the food, side dishes, soup tureen, and so on for an entire table of eight or ten persons. Even in those days of wartime ration coupons for meat, butter, and other items, the school produced sizable meals.
On the day in question, I was a waiter approaching the right-hand door to the kitchen from the dining room. A succession of waiters with trays already loaded emerged into the dining room from the other door. Just as I reached those doors, one waiter emerged from the kitchen with his mighty tray hoisted aloft, put his heel on a spot of spilled grease, and went ass over teakettle in front of the entire assemblage of more than one hundred horrified masters and students.
He did not, though, go down in a soupy jumble of crockery, broccoli, and flying silverware, as you might expect. Instead, as he fell, this big, husky guy somehow simply flung his whole tray and everything on it ceilingward with both hands, went down with a mighty bang, and slid forward past me into the dining room, unhurt and unscathed. The waiter following him, however, could not stop. This innocent reaped the whirlwind of the lofted tray in all its descending variety. The boy was not injured, but he became an instant pillar of salt, yes, and countless other edibles, an entire, standing, stewy, oozing, human smorgasbord of sliced meats, Harvard beets, mashed potatoes, assorted hot and cold greenery, gravy, crockery chips, and all the rest. Everyone else in that now-vanished place — except May Cotter, of course, and the stern headmaster Dexter Strong — had a good, unexpected, and always welcome laugh.
