My Second Summer Job

My Second Summer Job

  Growing up, I lived on a farm in southwestern Connecticut, too far from town to try working at any job that might be available to a teenager in those days. There were no fast food restaurants, and not much need for baby sitters, since mothers usually took their babies with them.

 After graduating from high school in of 1940, I ventured off to my first paid employment as an upstairs maid for rich people summering at Candlewood Lake. I have told that story previously in my first article on jobs, called “Jobs”. I quit before the summer was over and went back to the classified ads in the newspaper to find another.

A tearoom in Pound Ridge, New York, about 40 miles from home, needed a waitress. I applied and was hired for the remainder of the season.  It was a seasonal wayside inn built during Revolutionary era. The four waitresses lived in two large bedrooms on the second floor. The food and drink was not exceptional but the place was ‘gentile’. During the early days it is likely it was an inn where food and spirits were served to more earthy folks, but when I worked there it was a ‘nice place’ for ‘nice people’, and functioned as a destination for an afternoon drive, and a refined place to partake of a midday or evening meal.

Each day soup and salad, and a choice of three entrees were offered. Items could be deleted, but deviations from the planned menu were discouraged. For dessert there was pie, and either chocolate or vanilla ice cream with a choice of chocolate or butterscotch sauce, and a maraschino cherry on top. The difficulty for the waitresses was that we were not allowed to write the orders down. We were supposed to remember what each diner ordered. At a table of four or more people, that posed a problem. I usually got the main meal right, but the ice cream order always tripped me up. Chocolate or butterscotch sauce on vanilla or chocolate ice cream made for more possibilities than I could remember.

Cookies and tea were also offered. I remember because there was a very fat older lady, accompanied by her middle-aged son, who often sat at one of my tables. The cookies were crumbly and the crumbs fell on her expansive bosom. We were encouraged to take a napkin and lightly brush any crumbs away as the customers ate, and more than once, as I dusted delicately around their plates, I almost brushed off her bosom.

Although hired as a waitress, I soon found out the waitresses were expected to fill several other jobs. We helped as needed in the kitchen, ironed the heavily starched linen tablecloths and napkins, dusted the numerous pricey articles in the gift shop, and cleaned house in general in all the public areas. And for this we received the grand reward of $15 a week. I don’t remember if we got tips, so they couldn’t have amounted to much. Probably, we were not allowed tips because it wasn’t considered ‘nice’.

What I remember best about the six weeks I spent at the Pound Ridge Tea Room, was the free time we had on our day-off on Mondays. There was no settlement, or other houses, around the place, and the forest came close to the expansive lawns. There were inviting trails to hike in the surrounding hills. I imagined the trails were trod by Indians back during the French and Indian wars and earlier, and they probably were. There was a very large abandoned mansion on top of a hill about five miles away that we explored once. It had been a beautiful place that probably met its demise during the great depression in 1929. There had been considerable vandalism, but we could readily see how grand it once was.

Another memory is of my time there was about the national election of 1940. There was lively discussion about the merits of Roosevelt and Wilkie. I was a Republican because my parents were Republicans. It took me about fifty more years to see the error of my ways.

Because there was nowhere to spend money, except the gift shop, we all went home near the end of October with over $100 to apply, in my case, toward the tuition I would pay to enter nursing school at St. Lukes Hospital in New York City the following January.