Photo From the Archives: Dining in Commons

Reading Chris Webber ’53’s amusing letter about falling butter pats in Commons (Inbox, July/August issue) reminded me that I may be the only living alumnus who actually witnessed Hollie Donan ’51’s bid for Commons immortality. 

Hollie was one of Princeton’s greatest-ever football heroes. He led our 1950 team to an undefeated season, opening holes a mile wide for Jake McCandless and Dick Kazmaier. He also destroyed enemy quarterbacks; a true All-American.

Hollie was a waiter in Commons. I was a busboy. While biding my time, waiting for my turn to perform my post-meal duties, Hollie appeared out of the kitchen with a tray over his shoulder loaded with meat, mashed potatoes, peas, and gravy, headed for Lower Cloister. He slipped over a water slick and began to lose it as he reached the head of the stairs. With no one in sight down below, Hollie heaved his tray all the way to the far Lower Cloister hallway wall. It was a prodigious display of strength, and good sense.

It was also perhaps the loudest bang ever heard at Princeton. The young men awaiting their dinner down the hall thought they were being bombed.

Disposing of the mess was not in my job description as a busboy. But I quickly became part of the clean-up crew; all the time laughing my head off. In a very short time, the laughter spread over the University, earning Hollie Donan yet another biggest-man-on-campus accolade.

I often used the story when recruiting young athletes who said Princeton was too stuffy for their tastes. This story helped put their misgivings to rest. I think they could see themselves duplicating Hollie’s heave.

Donald Kirsch *78 writes in the May Inbox about a “big athlete” inventing a new Hoagie Haven sandwich of whole cheesesteak with double meat and double cheese, and then in the same issue, From the Archives makes a call for “Commons-related stories.” So here we go. 

Being a Food Services worker, the gamut of assigned roles varied from line-server to pot-wash (where cleaning the circular scimitar of the meat slicing machines could give a body religion; those things were scary sharp). But back to the letter of Donald Kirsch. I worked for Food Services and was assigned as fry cook one breakfast morning. The role is essentially that of a short-order cook on a large grill.

That morning, a student walks up and orders a dozen eggs “easy over.” I promptly respond, “Coming up!” and commence breaking those dozen and filling up the grill. The guy was maybe 6-foot-3 and probably some 220-odd pounds of what was massively mostly muscle. While the eggs sizzle and spit on the hot grill, I make some small talk. “So, where are your buddies?,” I ask in curiosity, using my spatula to push around the eggs. The guy looks at me kind of confused, and responds, “What?”

“Your friends,” I say. “Where are they?,” as I start flipping some of the eggs over. Because I’m thinking to myself that he was ordering all those eggs for himself and two or three others not yet present. “All these eggs can’t be just for you,” I said, looking up and locking eyes with him. I almost right there went into shock because the look in his eyes and his response instantly corrected the “eggs-istential” error of my assumption. “Those eggs are for me,” he said. “All of them.”

I’m supposing that he was a football player. I believe I served him on a few other breakfast occasions (always a full dozen, and always “easy over”). But it’s been a long time, and the faithfulness of recall is infernally fickle from afar. If he reads this account and recognizes himself in it, then I sure hope he will reach out. He was a nice guy; phenomenal appetite! That’s my Commons story.

Since you asked for stories about Commons, I figured I could send a brief report on my life there (since I ate there every semester of my Princeton career). On the one hand, from a nutritional point of view, it was probably a disaster. I wasn’t much taken with the main courses, and the result was that I lived largely off dinner rolls and banana cream pie. I must have had an iron constitution to survive on that, although my parents had been generous enough to provide me with a charge card for use at the Nassau Inn for Sunday morning breakfasts.

On the other hand, when I talk to applicants to Princeton these days, I extol the virtues of the conversations that I had over the years with fellow Commons diners. There was no subject that fell outside the range of interests, from politics to theater and beyond. Over the subsequent decades I have always been disappointed by the conversations in undergraduate eating halls wherever I’ve been teaching. The subjects have been limited to social life and sports, even if the food has been better. If I’m ever asked why some of those institutions did not produce so many Rhodes scholars as Princeton, I say that the dinner table conversations at Commons were better preparation for the Rhodes interviews than what was on offer elsewhere.

Do I have stories about Commons? Does a hobby horse have a wooden esophagus? 

You didn’t fully understand “Commons” unless you served as a waiter and then captain in the dining halls. The first or second day you were at Princeton as a freshman you spent “training” to be a waiter. You were taught by captains and headwaters who had been through the same experience and cut you no slack in the learning process. It was not easy and was one day only. You had to learn how to carry the tray on your left shoulder; how to lift it, which was problematic if the 2 gallon (?) pitchers for milk or water were full. You entered the kitchen on the door to the right (only) and had to watch out for people entering the dining halls from the other door. Two-way collisions could be catastrophic.

We had five dining halls: Upper Cloister, Lower Cloister, Upper Eagle, Sub Eagle (never found out why it wasn’t Lower Eagle), and Madison.

Two distinctly different experiences caused a ruckus resembling a prison riot with the banging of utensils on the tables. The first (and worse) was if you were the unfortunate dropper of a full tray. The second was if you had the courage to bring a female companion into the dining halls. This was generally a bad mistake.

Then there was the food. Very predictable and incredibly institutional. Breakfast always included cereal and some form of eggs. During my three years of laboring in the dining halls, I never once saw a single piece of bacon served.

For lunch, water was the beverage, and the food and was limited and very forgettable.

Dinner was generally a tray of “mystery meat,” or once a week, chopped meat  known affectionately as “elephant balls.”  Potatoes and vegetables always served family style.
If you were a waiter, you were allowed to snarl at anyone who asked for seconds or, God forbid, coffee. 

For those who like to linger over a second cup, it was not unusual for the waiter to take everything out from under the diner, in order to clean up the table (also the waiters’ responsibility).

I believe in those days (late ’50s) the University credited you $.50 for each table, which you never saw but was applied against your room and board. If you were an athlete, you had to squeeze in the necessary number of meals, which usually meant breakfasts and lunches if practices ran late (which they did).

As you can see, I am 70 years removed from my freshman orientation experiences with the dining halls. Clearly they were unforgettable.

The caption under the picture on page 54 of the May issue of the Alumni Weekly asks, “Do you have a Commons-related story you would like to share with PAW?” 

Well, why not? It’s too late for the Proctors to come get us! 

I was a waiter in Commons, as were many on scholarships and on the football team. Our job was to bring platters of food to the tables where students served themselves. We were deployed to the various eating halls and would sit and wait for the rush of hungry students. Somehow some of us thought it would be interesting to take a pat of butter and put it on the blade of a table knife and put the handle on the table. Then you could push down on the blade and release it and send the pat of butter soaring high in the air. Some of us managed to get the butter pats high enough to hit the high ceiling — and stick there! 

We liked to imagine that the pat might stick there for a while but come back down on a hungry student to his surprise. We were too busy bringing platters of food to be around for that possible denouement, but I wonder — would any reader remember being surprised by a falling butter pat?

Another aspect of Commons in the early 1950s was the source of the food supplied. We were told that it came from Howard Johnson’s, then a major purveyor of food in its roadside restaurants and famous for offering 28 flavors of ice cream. We thought this accounted for the fact that we were often provided with pistachio ice cream and it often seemed to have been re-frozen. It seemed logical to imagine that Howard Johnson’s would dump on us the ice cream they couldn’t sell in its restaurants.