BUSBOY MINIMUM WAGE WINDOWS

He says: “Back in the day, my son was young, I didn’t want to work weekends, I wanted to spend time with him. He’s rankled at the idea anyone could do any job automatically for so long without a complaint or regret. He doesn’t want the will inside him to dry up.” That’s like my grandfather and this place. It’s like people who are married a long time - if one dies, the next goes right after. That’s what he’s said: Old people don’t have nothing to do, they see their friends retire, and then they retire, and that’s when they die of boredom too. I just think he knows when people retire, they die. “He’s financially straight and everything. “He could retire now,” said Javon Chambers, his grandson, himself a Walker Bros.

There is only a man whose choices (amid a systemic lack of choices) offer snapshots, of the changing nature of work, of the lack of opportunities for people of color, of the assumptions we make about ambition. When he squinted, the same teenagers were still curled into the same booths, the same infants tossed crayons under the same tables, the same captains of industry put away the same post-workout pancake stacks.īecause the more you talk to Othea Loggan, and the more you think about clearing plates of pancakes for half of a century, the more details seem both too obvious and too complicated - there are few satisfying explanations. He had seen generations of customers and co-workers pass through he’d been there so long he watched Bill Murray go from neighborhood kid to superstar to venerated elder.

BUSBOY MINIMUM WAGE WINDOWS

He made whipped butter, and squeezed the oranges for OJ, but mostly, he still bussed plates and glasses, tidied up the same dark wooden booths, passed the same windows inlaid with the same stained-glass foliage, noted the same line of customers snaking out of the front doors, received waves and hugs (and sometimes Bulls tickets) from the same regulars.

The title had evolved since 1964 he was now a “busser.” But he still wore the kind of throwback paper hat that a busser wore in 1964. So, he had stayed a busboy, for 54 years. He had never left, never graduated to serving tables, never became a manager or a chef - he says he never asked to do anything else.

Busboy minimum wage