Where I learned to work

I didn't have to work when I was growing up. My dad had worked hard from a very early age, so he decided to protect his kids from that. We've since discussed this parenting philosophy and he admits that he might have gone too far. Since I didn't get my first job until I was twenty years old, that meant that I had to learn how to work. Sure, I had some chores around the house, but taking out the trash and sweeping the steps now and then could hardly challenge me like a real job could. So, not counting a miserable year in college, I was living away from my parents house for the first time in 1979. I was unemployed, broke and living off the grace of some good friends who had decided to all move in together. No one romanctically involved...yet. One of these good friends, Dave, had a brother that worked at O'Connell's Pub. This is a south side bar and restaurant famous for their hamburgers. He started working there first and I remember feeling betrayed. "Hey, who do you think you are, going off and working? I thought we were a team." You see, we were practicing our guitars eight hours a day and planned on making it big. A week later, he called Russ to see if he wanted a job and then another week later he called me. I started as a salad cook. I worked mostly nights, going in to work at 2:00 pm and getting home around 1:00 - 1:30 am. I proudly said to myself one day, "I can work here until I have enough money to buy an electric guitar and amplifier, then I can quit because obviously I won't have to work anymore. I'll be on my way." The first couple of weeks were very hard. At O'connell's, the salad and fry orders are called out verbally. No tickets of any kind. Keep in mind there's only one kind of salad, and at that time one fried item, mushrooms, that the salad cook was responsible for. But everything had to be made to order. When a salad was called out, you open a refrigerator door, drop to your knees, toss a handful of iceberg lettuce into a big stainless steel bowl, scoop your big serving spoon into the house dressing and mix it up. If two or three or more salads were called out, you just put in more lettuce and dressing. Then you stand up, lay out the plates and dump the mix onto them. (In all the time I was there, we used chinette plates and plasticware.) Then, a handful of diced salami, two pepperincinnis, and your done; slide them over the counter where the girls pick them up. All this in addition to the fried mushrooms, making cold sandwiches that were called out by the grill cook, and keeping him stocked with fries and anything else he needed. On a Saturday night, O'Connell's was hopping. In those days the St. Louis Blues Hockey team played at the "Arena." It was not far from there and on nights the Blues were town, wow! It was wall to wall people for hour after hour. At first it was overwhelming. I remember thinking, "how can anybody do this? This is crazy." But, before long, I became pretty good at it. Though I needed to learn about the physical challenges of this demanding job, as it turns out, my parents had instilled a strong work ethic. I "needed" to do the job right. I wanted to please my boss. I remember the owner saying to someone else about me, "He's got the fire in his belly." I didn't know what that meant at the time, but I figured it was good. I remained a salad/prep cook for about five years, until the manager decided to quit. I went to talk to the owner to convice him I could manage this little kitchen of three or four guys and he gave me a shot. I then worked mornings instead of nights and within the next five years that I was employed there, I got married, lost one child to miscarriage and then had another, my daughter Emily. I would be in the restaurant business another ten years after leaving O'Connell's but the lessons learned there always served me well. Very few establishments were as consistently busy as that one, so they all seemed easy in comparison. And though I stayed in management most of those last years, I always wished I could just cook for a living. Just like back in the day.