For Butter or Worse

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.