One of the truest things I know about my mother and her work in the restaurant is how central that work was to her sense of self and engagement with the world. What I also know from our shared experience is that her choice of work and the meaning she ascribed to it was shaped by the course of her own life history and the web of social and economic forces surrounding it. My mother didn’t choose or execute her work in a vacuum—none of us do- Let me begin, then, with a brief overview of my mother’s working life—a life initially defined by the immigrant experience, poverty, and the Great Depression.
Rose Emily Seraglio came to the United States from southern Italy as a little girl in the early 1920S and settled with her family in Alton, Pennsylvania. Her father worked as a laborer for the Pennsylvania Railroad (and would eventually leave the yards disabled). Her mother raised seven children, took in boarders, made illegal wine and beer, and did whatever else she could to enable the family to survive. Rose was taken out of school in the seventh grade to help raise her three younger brothers and to assist with the tending of the boarders: cooking, dealing, laundering. She did this work well into her teens, eventually taking a job in a garment factory and, briefly, in a local Italian restaurant, a job that wouldn’t last, for “not a soul came in there.” This early work at home and beyond was surrounded by profound economic need—and a sense
of financial vulnerability would remain with my mother for the rest of her life.
The next phase of my mother’s economic history came with her marriage to my father, Tommy Rose: the two opened and ran an Italian restaurant in downtown Alton, open twenty-four hours a day to cater to the round-the-clock schedule of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the core of the city’s economy. Self-described as a “raggedy” and “shy” girl, Rose developed quickly from private household labors and routinized factory work to a young woman in a public role, laden with new, often unpredictable, responsibilities:
from cooking, hiring help, and ordering supplies to hostessing, waiting on tables, and tending the register. She would sometimes work fifteen to seventeen hours a day, for she had to remedy whatever mishaps arose. Here’s a not atypical entry in a daily journal she kept during those years:
Mrs. Tenner walked out on account of Mrs. Kaufman. So here I am alone cooking. June didn’t show up either. . - I’m so tired.
But along with the accounts of exhaustion and anxiety, there is also testament to the fulfillment this new life brought:
On this day, I’m two years in business. I love it.
For all its tribulations, the restaurant contrasted with the lonely oppressiveness of her earlier labors, provided the conditions to gain knowledge about the restaurant business through immersion in it, and enabled my mother to learn how to “be with the public.”
Though financially uneven, the restaurant did well enough through World War H and just after. But as the Pennsylvania Railroad—along with the railroad industry generally—began its first stage of decline, closing shops, laying people off (my uncle Frank among them), the Rose Spaghetti House failed, ending in bankruptcy This was 1951. Over the next year, my parents would
move to Los Angele’s in search of opportunity and a warmer climate for my father, whose health was failing. They had little money and no connections whatsoever; friends and family were twenty- five hundred miles away, a lament I often heard. 1 was seven. My father couldn’t work. So my mother went in search of the kind of work her limited formal education and her experience with the restaurant made possible, work she would continue until 1979, when illness forced her into retirement at sixty-four.
At first she waitresses in a series of coffee shops in downtown L.A., the largest stretch at Coffee Dan’s on heavily trafficked Broadway. Then she moved to Norm’s, a “family-style” chain, working for nearly a decade at the shop on Sunset and Vermont, by major medical facilities and corporate offices, like that for Prudential. She spent her last ten years at the Norm’s in Torrance, amid a more lower-middle class, local merchant, and retirement clientele. During her time at Coffee Dan’s and Norm’s Sunset, my father would slip into grave illness and, for the last years of his life, be bedridden. I proceeded through elementary and high school. Mustering what immediate help she could, she struggled to balance work, care taking, and child rearing. This period, roughly from 1952 to the early sixties, was another period of severe hardship. As my mother put it simply: “Dad was ill, and you were little…. I had to get work.”
My father died in 1961. Eventually my mother would meet and marry a man who was a truck driver with the city, a job with stable wages and benefits. They bought a house in Torrance—a nicer house and safer—and she began her final ten years of waitress at the Norm’s nearby. This was a decade of economically better times. Even after she had to quit waitress, my stepfather’s employment carried them through comfortably. But my mother’s inactivity during these early years of her retirement brings to the fore the centrality of physical work to her sense of who she is. For all
the strain of waitress, the work provided her with a way to feel useful, to engage her mind, and to be in the flow of things. When in the mid-198os a neighbor got her a job as a noon aide at a local elementary school, she was revitalized. Her primary responsibility was to seat children for lunch and assist in fearing their tables. The job provided a few hours of minimum wage and, of course, no tips—it was barely a postscript to her economic life—but it held great value for her because of its mix of utility and nurturer. And it thrust her back into life’s hustle. And it called on some of her waitress skills. Though work for my mother was always driven by economic need, it was driven by a blend of other needs as well: cognitive, social, existential.
With this biography as backdrop, let me begin analyzing the work my mother did. Each of the restaurants that employed her had its own character and history, of course, but there are certain regularities to them—and to the many thousands like them—that can be abstracted and can help us understand the particular demands of waitress sing.