Social lessons

A wave of memories washed over me earlier this week as I read the front-page story about the middle-school students who learned about etiquette and ate a fine meal at Mollie's Cafe in downtown Cape Girardeau.

This was probably an evening of many firsts for the students, who were being exposed to some of the finer rules of Miss Emily Post at a far younger age than I was.

When you grow up on Killough Valley in the Ozark hills over yonder, you are not exactly a social dandy, but neither are you brought up without learning the basics.

Manners were important in my family and the families of all my friends. We were respectful to our elders. We said "Yes, sir" and "Yes, ma'am." Boys opened doors for girls and mothers. We stood when introduced to someone we didn't know.

We had table manners, too. We didn't put our elbows on the table at mealtime. Our mothers knew how to set a table, with fork on the left (for reasons I still do not understand) and knife and spoon on the right. We did not slurp our soup or milk.

But I distinctly remember my own night of many firsts that included a salad served by itself, a shrimp cocktail, a small plate just for bread, more silverware than I knew existed, and a dead man.

I'll explain.

I was, I think, a junior in the high school in my favorite hometown when a Beta Club chapter was organized. One of the highlights of belonging to the Beta Club was the opportunity to go to the convention in St. Louis, which was, for most of us, a really big deal. For one thing, this was the first time I ever stayed in a big hotel, and my parents weren't there.

It was, I remember, the Jefferson Hotel in downtown St. Louis. That was when downtown was the heart of St. Louis, before the first bulldozer had cleared all the trees in western St. Louis County for what soon would become suburbia and the end of a city's pulse.

The Jefferson Hotel had a ballroom where the Beta Club banquet was held. It was, as far as I know, the largest assembly of human beings I have ever participated in other than a baseball game at the old Sportsman's Park or a movie when I was 4 or 5 at the Fox Theater on Grand.

The ballroom held several hundred Beta Club members and their adult sponsors, all decked out in their Sunday best, even though it was Friday night. We sat at tables of eight. The tables were draped with white linen tablecloths, and the napkins were linen, too. There was an array of silverware on the left, more on the right and some leftover spoons and whatnot above the plate, all reflecting the sparking light of the largest crystal chandelier I have ever seen. There was a plate for food and another for bread. The butter that was passed around was shaped like scallop shells. The bread was crusty rolls, not sliced Wonder bread.

When the first course arrived, it was a shrimp cocktail. I had never seen a shrimp, dead or alive, before. It looked like a skimpy dinner to me.

"Don't worry," Mrs. Coder, our faculty sponsor hastened to assure us. "There's more coming."

Sure enough, we soon had a plate of salad in front of us, and we got to choose dressings that were not in Wishbone bottles.

I don't remember much about the main course or dessert, because a commotion at the long head table of dignitaries drew everyone's attention.

A man wearing a tuxedo was slumped in his chair, and several nearby adults picked him up and placed him on the floor. In a few minutes, someone used the microphone at the lectern to tell us that everything was OK and to enjoy our meal.

OK for us maybe. The man, we learned later, had had a heart attack and died. Right there in the ballroom of the Jefferson Hotel beneath the crystal chandelier right after I tasted shrimp cocktail for the first time.

I doubt that Mollie's offers much in the way of special training for etiquette on the occasion of a death at mealtime.

But it's an evening I'll never forget.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.