How a garbage disposal sealed the fate of our lives

Talk about a wave of nostalgia.

That's what swept over me a few days ago when I read the Associated Press story about the closing of the next-to-last Howard Johnson restaurant in the United States.

Howard Johnson is special to me because that's where I met my wife-to-be. More about that in a minute.

The next-to-last Howard Johnson restaurant is in Maine. Like at so many others in the nationwide chain, business has been dropping off year by year. The operators of the Maine restaurant decided to call it quits.

This means the very last Howard Johnson restaurant will be the one at Lake Placid in New York State. The operators there say business is good, and they have no plans to shutter the store anytime soon.

Good.

It would be horrible to think that future generations would be deprived of the opportunity to have ever eaten all 28 flavors of ice cream for which Howard Johnson restaurants were famously known.

And don't forget the all-you-can-eat fried fish and clams on Wednesday nights. Talk about packing in hungry diners.

I know what Howard Johnson regulars ate -- or left behind on their plates. I was the fellow who cleaned up after them.

Fifty-two years ago, before political correctness had become an uncontrollable cancer, Howard Johnson restaurants, like most family eateries, had waitresses. In those days, only high-end restaurants, the kind I never visited because of the expense, had anything close to waiters -- that is, men who served food. Nowadays, everyone who works in a restaurant and has any contact with a paying customer is called a server. Somewhere along the line in the past half-century it became inappropriate to refer to the women who took your order and brought plates of food to your table as waitresses.

There are, however, still a few good waitresses around. You can find some of them right here in Cape Girardeau. They've been carrying hot plates to customers' tables for years. They don't mind being called waitresses. As a matter of fact, some of them insist on it and get a bit huffy if you make a big deal about being a "server."

But I digress.

In the summer of 1964, before our last years in college, the woman who would become my wife and I both took jobs at the Howard Johnson restaurant on Russell Road in northern Kansas City where I-29 and I-35 split as both interstates were still under construction.

My wife-to-be was a waitress. I was a bus boy. My wife did not have a problem being called a waitress. I didn't mind being called a "boy." We both had jobs. That was the important thing. Without these jobs, our college careers might have been over. We did not want work on assembly lines at auto factories or steel mills. We did not want to be restaurateurs. One summer of the restaurant business was plenty, thank you.

Our job duties were fairly obvious. My wife-to-be took orders and served food. However, waitresses did not clean up the mess when diners paid their bills and left. That was the bus boy's job.

By the way, it was also the bus boy's job to clean the restrooms on a regular schedule. I hate to leave that image in your mind, but let's face it: Someone has to do the dirty work in a restaurant.

That's why Howard Johnson restaurants had bus boys. They cleared tables, dumped uneaten food into an industrial garbage disposal, stacked dishes and silverware in an industrial dishwasher, washed commercial-sized pots and pans and helped unload truckloads of frozen food delivered two or three times a week to the back door of the restaurant.

Waitresses then wore special uniforms that were not the most flattering attire in the world, but there was no mistaking who was a waitress and who was not.

Bus boys also had a uniform. It consisted of white pants and a double-breasted white top like the ones chefs wear. This outfit was provided in a dressing room off the kitchen. Sometimes the right size of bus boy uniform had not returned from the cleaners.

Early in the summer I was wearing a top that was about two sizes too small for me. The top was particularly tight around my tummy. I was scraping leftovers into the garbage disposal when this good-looking blonde came by. She eyed my too-small top. I said, "Great expectations."

You never know which ripple in your life will change the world, but that remark ("Great expectations") struck a chord. It probably helped that we were both English majors at our respective schools.

In any event, we started dating, and by the end of the summer we were engaged. Just like that. The following June we were married in her hometown. Fifty-one years later, if either of us wants to give the other a little lift, all we have to do is say, "Great expectations."

This is a true story, one our sons have heard over and over. When we lived in northwestern Missouri and drove to see grandparents in west-central Missouri, we would always drive by the Howard Johnson restaurant on Russell Road. Every time we passed they had to hear the story of how their parents met by the garbage disposal at that very restaurant. They could repeat the story, word for word, but mostly they just groaned at having to hear it one more time.

I don't know when that restaurant closed. We haven't driven by the Russell Road exit in years.

If we did so, I know what would be going through our minds. So do you.

Great expectations.

Sometimes they turn out just the way you hoped.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.