Always Answer a Ringing Phone, part one
My adventures as a short order cook at the Band Box diner in the 80s
A three part series.
Part one | Part two | Part three
At the time, the Spring of 1981, I worked on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis at the Magic Pan. My job as Crepe Assembler involved ladling pre-made fillings into pre-made crepes, and folding the crepes back over the filling. A monkey could have done it. It was easily among the worst jobs I’ve ever had, and I’ve taught middle school.
One afternoon, walking home from work after the lunch shift and hating my job, I wandered past a tiny restaurant I passed nearly every day. The big red plastic letters above the window spelled out the name of the place: BAND BOX. You had to walk around to the side of the building to see the DINER part. For some reason the hand-written “Hot Chili” sign in the window caught my attention, and I walked inside.
The Grateful Dead was playing on a boombox, not too loudly. The guy behind the counter had a mass of red hair piled into a hat, and a goofy, open smile. I asked for chili and he brought me a bowl, with cheese and extra crackers. It was good.
While I ate, I noticed the sign behind the red-haired kid (I call him a kid, but I was just a kid myself; we were all kids). “Help Wanted.” I finished my chili, brought the bowl back to the counter. The kid took my bowl, that big goofy grin still on his face.
I asked, “You like the Dead?”
He said (still grinning), “I knew you were gonna ask me that.”
“Are you guys really hiring?”
He laughed. “I knew you were gonna ask me that too.”
#
The Band Box is still around, and still operating, just off of the corner of 10th and Chicago in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At last check they were open Wednesday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., and on Saturdays they’re open 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
I just had breakfast there. My home is in Colorado, but I called up two old friends of mine and asked them if they’d like to have breakfast in the Band Box, on me. One of them is among my oldest friends in the world: Gordon. He was my best friend in high school. The mutual friend we’re having breakfast with—Steve, but call him Yog—is someone I’ve known nearly as long. They arrive at the Band Box as it’s opening, and invited me to their table via cellphone video.
They hand off the phone to the cook, and we talk briefly about the storied history of the place. I let him get back to the grill, and we all sit down for breakfast. It is difficult to hear, with the breakfast crowd coming in, but we converse as best we can. I hear the sizzle of the grill, though, and the opening of the front door, the squeak of chairs, the laughter and chatter at the surrounding tables. I can all but smell the bacon and eggs and coffee. Bright morning light from outside the building floods the floors and walls.
Those sounds and sights of the Band Box in action—the grill, the crowd, the chatter—are a time machine, taking me back forty years.
#
The Band Box opened in 1939, using a business model based on White Castle chain, and at one time had fifteen locations in the Minneapolis area (10th St. is the only remaining location). It’s opened and closed often in its history. According to what I can find online, the pandemic hit it pretty hard, but a successful fundraiser brought it back from the dead in 2021. Prior to that, a grassroots campaign in 2015 brought in enough funds to install a new grill.
The building is tiny: originally a 26 ft. by 23 ft. footprint, a pre-fabricated structure made of double-sided steel. The roof is flat, and three large windows look out onto the corner of 10th St., and Chicago Ave. beyond. When I worked there, in the early 80s, the Band Box seated twelve people at the three tables along those windows, and seven more at the counter. It was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 3 shifts a day. It never closed. One person did all the work, all by themselves: you took the orders, cooked the food, wiped the tables, washed the dishes, and ran the register. If someone got belligerent, you called 911 or threw them out yourself. The only exception was the weekend breakfast rush, which started during the 11 a.m. to 7 a.m. graveyard shift, but ended during the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift. During weekend breakfast rush, the night cook (usually me) would hang around for a bit, helping out by taking orders and delivering meals until the rush died down.
The night cook (again, usually me) would get paid in free breakfast and a newspaper to read.
#
My job interview occurred at the Band Box with the then-owner of the Band Box, Peter D. I’ve just spent a half hour trying to find him over the internet, and tracked down his obituary: he died in 2016. Time is a thief.
He was older than me, and I’m in my 60s, so I guess his obit should not come as a surprise, and it doesn’t, but it does sadden me. The week I left Minneapolis to move to New York, I met up with him at a bar on Minneapolis’s West Bank, and he told me a story I’d remember, with some pride, for the rest of my days: he did not expect me to last a full day of work. This was a rough neighborhood, and I was fresh out of college and apparently looked like it. When he came back to check on me on my first day, he expected me to be frazzled and overwhelmed and ready to quit.
I didn’t quit. When he checked back on me at the end of the day, all my prep work was done, and I was cleaning the back room. He asked if I’d encountered any problems that day. I told him the truth. Everything had gone just fine. I loved working there. But perhaps that’s just the rose-tinted view talking, as I think back on it, decades later.
#
The menu consisted of the standard breakfast fare: eggs, bacon, sausage hash browns, toast, coffee. For lunch: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, bacon burgers, bacon cheeseburgers, and the Band Burger, which was a bacon cheeseburger on an English Muffin. All the burgers came with fried onions (I’m getting hungry just writing this).
Our chili came out of big industrial cans. It wasn’t bad, and we’d put it on anything for free, burgers to eggs to hash browns. Sometimes we had soup too, that came out of similar cans, but it wasn’t popular.
If the grease in the deep fryer was in good condition, we served fries. We changed the grease once a week, on the weekend, so Sunday through Wednesday-ish, fries came with that burger. After the grease went bad, we served hash browns instead.
Personally, I found Band Box hash browns to be the star of the menu. We boiled the potatoes the night before, then stuck them in the fridge overnight. Morning prep involved shredding the cold but cooked potatoes with a cheese shredder into a large metal tin. We served hash browns all day long.
I don’t make hash browns often any more—you have to prep the night before, and I am rarely that organized—but when I do, I make them this way, shredded cold with a cheese grater and fried up in a sizzling pan. When my kids were growing up and saw me prepping potatoes for hash browns the next morning, they celebrated.
Someone ordered liver and onion once, as it was on the menu, but when I went to the back freezer I had to chip the package of liver out of the accumulated ice. I made liver and onions for that first man who ordered them, but after that I just told people we were all out.
#
I want to return to that obituary for just a second before moving forward. It says that Peter D was “cofounder and CEO of Tilt Chair Co., and served as a consultant to furniture manufacturers in the U.S. and abroad. He held five patents for innovations that improved the functionality of folding futon furniture.”
He made art too: jewelry and furniture and sculpture.
I didn’t know any of this about him, but I’m unsurprised. He seemed like a man of multiple talents. It reminds me of advice Peter gave me once: “Always answer a ringing phone.” He may have meant something more figurative, about never passing opportunity by, but in the anecdote he told me, the meaning is literal.
He explained that he once passed a ringing pay phone, picked up the receiver, and landed some sort of deal, perhaps even involving the Tilt Chair Company, that set him on the course of the rest of his life. He encouraged me to do the same.
I’ve picked up a number of figurative ringing phones in the nearly forty years since he gave me that advice. I think I’ve only literally taken his advice once. After I moved to New York City, I was walking into the Atlantic Ave. subway stop in Brooklyn when one of the phones in a bank of phones started ringing. Remembering Mr. D, I picked it up.
It was a drug dealer. He told me to get off the phone and keep moving.
Peace.
To be continued…
Photo credit to Eater Twin City