Thirty years ago, I worked as the night cook at Clydes' in Georgetown. My training was about a half hour of the day cook showing me and a fellow named DJ the various dishes and what we had to do to prepare for the next day. What he didn't mention was that very little would be prepared for our shift so every night it was a race to weigh out hamburger patties from five pound bags, peel a sack or two of potatoes and run them through a machine that sliced them into fry-size chips, prepare salads, cook turkeys, slice New York strip steaks from shells of beef, and make Hollandaise sauce (a skill I've long forgotten). That's in addition to cooking, really preparing for the day shift and cleaning the kitchen from the floors to the stove cook tops. DJ didn't last long. To me it was a challenge and probably the best training in the world for multi-tasking.
Having three to five waiters/waitresses bring multiple orders virtually at the same time, then preparing each individual meal to be completed exactly when the others come up so they can be served together while starting each successive order to keep the next waiter in line (and the customers) happy was daunting but doable. In fact it was fun.
In the midst of this organized chaos, everyone from top of the economic food chain oral surgeons and their wives would come to the kitchen to unload stories of family vacations and emotional crises. The folks using my kitchen much the same way people use barber shops, beauty salons and therapists would parade in completely oblivious to the culinary juggling act before them. There were newly graduated Georgetown law students working as waiters who would taut the benefits of Bhuddism, Cops looking for a free meal (including a pacifist Quaker who was against war but saw no conflict in carrying a pistol to enforce the law), musicians, filmmakers, you name them all looking to unload the problems of the day on someone who would listen.
One young Virginia college student came in and when I asked what he was studying, answered "management." I was dumbstruck. Here was a kid who never worked a menial job in his life and he wanted to go directly into managing folks twice his age who worked from dawn to dusk, served in the military whether Vietnam (going on at the time), Korea or WWII, raised families and survived all the other stuff that goes along with making one's way through life.
That kid's attitude is even more prevalent today. Everyone wants to start at the top, drive a Mercedes or Lexus, and ignore anyone who is not a CEO now. This is particularly irritating after the age of 60 when friends and relatives around you are getting tossed from jobs they've held for thirty years in favor of youngsters with energy and confidence (and who will take for the time being less in the way of salary than a veteran of the job).
Sam Rayburn's longtime assistant (whose name I will remember the instant I post this) a gent I met decades ago who was a close friend of another friend, Maury Maverick Jr., once described to me his impression of folks in Dallas versus those from Fort Worth, Texas. We both loved and admired friends from Fort Worth, but, at that time kind of viewed Dallas as a more Northern city. At any rate he described the stereotypical Dallas-ite as being in "too big a hurry to make money to shake your hand." (His name was D.B. Hardiman, taught at Trinity here in DC and had more books in his apartment than most bookstores. I know. Helped pack them and drive them back to Texas.)
My point? A lot of institutional memory is being erased in the push for youth. A lot of talent and know-how available to the young is being wasted by ignoring lessons never asked of those with experience. And life does not end once you reach a certain age.
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