The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Right after I’d graduated college and quit my job as 8th grade teacher — deciding, I guess, I’d had my fill of institutional learning — I applied for a job as ‘food manager’ of the University’s Student Union. I’d been supervisor of the dining hall that served most of the old dormitories on the Univ. of Wisconsin lakefront for three years so I was hired to run a dining hall, an ice cream parlor and a grill on the side of campus where engineers and folks who wanted a career that would result in well-paying jobs would go to eat. Unlike the Union on the lakefront where folks who majored in Renaissance English or Poly Sci came to plot the Revolution, this being the late ‘60’s, early ‘70’s, when idealism trumped fiscal survival. Good Karma was all we needed.

I lasted three months, not long after the Union South Poisonings in which multiple students and staff ate the potato salads left under the heating lights to grow bacterial toxins. Hell if I knew mayonnaise would spoil so quick. I was good at managing a hundred employees. Food, not so much.

Dave, my boss who ran the entire Union, asked how I could not know that. I told him I had a degree in Useless Information, not Food Science. ‘You knew that when you hired me,’ I said as my no mea culpa, but in the end I pled guilty and told him I would move on soon as he found a suitable replacement, which took no time flat, some former military cook. The days of my employees smoking dope in the freezer with me were about to end. The General would tighten their ship, count on that, Mister!

Dave wanted me to go back to school, get a degree in Restaurant and Hospitality. Good jobs, he pitched. ‘Well paid. You could go anywhere and find work.’ Dave was a good guy, even after I refused to wear ties, dress up or act adult. I think he saw me as the kid he never had, but he could steer from delinquency to the straight and very narrow.

Course, I had bigger dreams. A month after I’d trained Col. Hardass my job, I walked into a Humane Society that needed a kennel worker, two bucks an hour, no managerial responsibilities whatsoever, got hired on the spot, started the very next day. The rest, as they say in the movies, was history. I was on my way ….

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