Publisher's Synopsis
A wonderfully universal, coming of age story of growing up in America and the experiences we have all had dealing with our very "first" jobs. The memoir is a window on another era, when hotels with uniformed waiters. busboys, and maitre d's, served wealthy clientele five-course meals on fine china with linen napkins, seven or eight utensils and countless dishes per place setting. The struggle, the dreams, the triumphs and disappointments of a teenage busboy are wound together in a charming and very humorous story that adults and especially parents will enjoy and relate to.The true story of 24 teenage boys serving food to hundreds of guests at a large, resort hotel where kosher food was prepared by non-English speaking Chinese chefs. Teenage waiters and busboys breaking rules of quality customer service, rules of sanitation and violating kosher traditions in their efforts to get through each meal and keep the guests from complaining. You will laugh out loud until there are tears running down your face from laughing so hard! Set in the late 1960s, it follows the early career of (now) behavioral psychologist Dr. K.L. Laytin, as he rose from an inexperienced busboy to waiter and then to captain of the waiters, earning money for college tuition at a kosher hotel in the middle of dairy cow and chicken farms in rural New England. The hotel's efforts to minimize the cost of feeding 24 teenage boys led the boys to turn stealing food from the hotel into an industry. Their competition for inadequate resources to serve all of the guests had boys fighting over teaspoons and stealing dishes from one another. Their unpaid assignments, such a "Gigolo Duty," wherein they were assigned to 'mingle' with the very senior female guests at the hotel in the evening, the guests with blue hair and a dependence on prunes, will shock you. Many adults share the experience of being a teenager working in the food service industry. But not like this!
