Always Answer a Ringing Phone, part three
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
About a year after I started working at the Band Box, Peter D rented the place to a blowsy Irish alcoholic named Mae F (I’ve never used the word “blowsy” to describe someone before, but it fits). I don’t know the deal they struck, but essentially, she paid rent to him for the use of the place, and she kept any profits, after expenses.
From the beginning, it didn’t look like a sustainable business. I got along with Mae pretty well, but I knew she didn’t have the skills to manage the place. She ran things by the seat of her pants. I’m not saying she needed spreadsheets and a mission statement to make the business work (this was a pre-Excel era anyway), but she at the very least needed a ledger to record credit and debt.
Vendors who came to our door were not always paid, and had to be turned away. One morning she turned away the hamburger guy, and we had to buy hamburger from Kenny’s across the street. Mae would routinely take money out of the register to spend for personal expenses (which was fine, it was her money, but no one tracked where money was going). She and her extended family took over many of the daytime shifts, although there were still several for the rest of us. Sometimes Mae showed up with a homemade pot roast from home, or a stew, or sandwiches. She cooked well, and the results were tasty (that pot roast was especially good). But she didn’t track the amount she spent, or the amount she brought in. And sometimes no one showed up to run Mae’s traditional morning shift, if she was too hungover.
Some of the short order cooks left, as the number of available shifts dwindled.
Still, the Band Box was often busy, and seemed to be making enough money to survive.
The first danger sign was when Mae stopped filling the cigarette machine. Cigarette machines hold a lot of cigarettes, and thus a lot of money. According to my math (and pictures of old cigarette machines online), a machine holds twenty-two cartons of cigarettes, or two hundred and twenty packs, which, at two dollars a pack, is a little over four hundred dollars. So, as the Band Box slowly lost money, the cigarette machine was a four-hundred dollar nest egg you could tap into. The problem, of course, is that you have to pay four hundred dollars to refill it. So, when the cigarettes were gone, the nest egg was gone.
Mae cancelled the 11 to 7 shift, because it didn’t bring in enough money to warrant the cost. I grabbed enough afternoon shifts to compensate.
#
The beginning of the end came into view one night when Ken and Matt and I decided to play nickel ante poker at the Band Box, after the dinner rush ended and the place closed down for the night. We brought over a case of Leinenkugel in long neck bottles, a deck of cards, most of the Band Box short order cooks and a few Elliot park neighborhood friends. Someone brought a Polaroid camera, which was a thing at the time.
Remember the Polaroid.
The Band Box was a great place to play poker. We played in full view of the street outside, through those big front windows, and so we were on view to the street as well (the doors were locked, so no one could rob the game). We played, we drank, we had a great deal of fun, and when we were done we cleaned up the place so well there was little evidence we were even there.
The only evidence of the game was a Polaroid we left for Mae, of all the Band Box workers gathered at the poker table. For those of you too young to know, a Polaroid camera takes a picture and spit outs a paper print of the picture, which develops over the course of a minute or two. We left our photo propped up on the register, for her to see the next morning. Otherwise the place was spotless.
We figured she’d come in the next morning, see the picture, and laugh.
She fired all of us.
#
I say she fired all of us, but things by this point had grown pretty chaotic. The second or third hand story I’d heard was that when Mae opened up the Band Box the next morning, she flipped out, firing everyone who’d played poker than night, and announcing she run the place by herself from now on.
She owed the food vendors money, and she owed Peter D rent, and the cigarette machine was empty. By the weekend, the Band Box had gone dark. The poker game hadn’t killed the place, but it had provided the catalyst for the restaurant’s demise.
I walked across the street and got a job as a cashier at Kenny’s Market. They knew me pretty well there already and I guess they thought me dependable. About a week after I got the job, someone invited me to a party at their house that night as I was walking to work.
I said, “Sure.” I’d only been working at Kenny’s a few days, I figured I’d walk in, quit, and go to that party.
I told my boss at Kenny’s I was quitting. He said I owed him the shift I just showed up for, and with this late notice he had no one to replace me. He wasn’t wrong. I followed my conscience and worked the shift.
A few hours into the shift, the boss wrote a number on a piece of paper, handed it to me, and asked me if I wanted to be an Assistant Manager. If I said yes, he’d pay me the amount on the paper.
It was a ridiculously low number (if I’m remembering correctly, twelve thousand a year). But I’d never been a salaried employee before. No one had ever written a number down on a piece of paper and slid it to me.
Mostly, though, I remembered Peter D’s advice to me: “Always pick up a ringing phone.” That salaried job finding its way to me out of the blue seemed enough like a ringing phone that I felt compelled to pick it up.
I worked there all summer, saved every penny I could, and toward the end of the summer I used to at money to move to New York City, and begin the next phase of my life.
#
The Quaker Oats company sold The Magic Pan in 1982, and the one on Nicollet Mall closed some time ago, though I can’t pin down a date. Incredibly, former employees of the Magic Pan have their own Facebook page too, though don’t study it too closely. I can’t emphasize enough how much I hated that job. I read there are now revamped Magic Pans in airports, selling crepes to go.
Time is a thief.
The Band Box is still around, though, and appears to be thriving. The place is cleaner, and larger, and the menu has been revamped. Back at breakfast, in real time, my friends order their meals—coffee, eggs, sausage, no toast—and we talk about the things older men tend to talk about: upcoming retirement, politics, husbands and wives, the deaths of friends and family, shared memories. As we talk, I can see Elliot Park through the windows of the place, and superimpose my memories of those streets upon the newer, nicer incarnation of the neighborhood.
I try to pick up the tab, but my friends won’t let me. They’re good people, and it is refreshing to see them again.
The Band Box has been sitting on that street corner for over eighty years. Drop by for a burger sometime, and let the history wash over you.
Picture a pretty girl leaning against the doorway, asking you if you’re working hard, or hardly working.
Sit down at the counter and order yourself a cup of coffee and tell everyone you just won a million bucks.
Peace.
The End