The Bramson Archive Gets Larger & Larger Part V
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By Seth H. Bramson
We will certainly continue from where we left off last time in a moment, but before we do I have to give a “Tip of the Hatlo Hat” (you have to be in my age area to remember the great one-panel comic which appeared in what was once a great newspaper here in Miami, now sadly destroyed but known for years as “The Miami Daily News.”) That cartoon was a marvelous work done each day or week by Jimmy Hatlo and those five words were his trademark and he wrote them with a figure of a man tipping his hat when somebody sent in something that he could use.
Happily, I can now extend a “tip of the Hatlo Hat” to one of our readers, a young fellow by the name of Bennett Bramson, who, in reading the previous column noted my reference to a 70s song from which I took the words which were in the song and used them to refer to myself as “a noble-faired, long-haired leaping gnome” but wrote that I was having a JUNIOR moment and couldn’t remember the name of the song. Well, Bennett did, and the song was “Spill the Wine” by Eric Burden and the band “War,” so as with so many things in our lives for which I owe so much to my beloved brother, he has surely (“Don’t call me Shirley!” from “Airplane!”) earned the aforementioned “Tip of the Hatlo Hat!” And with that digression, we get back to the business at hand, which, of course, is entertaining all of you!
Once I got to Cornell, with not much money in my pocket, I had to go to work and so went to the Statler Hall office to see what might be available. Fortunately or unfortunately what was available was a job as a banquet waiter for events in the Statler Ballroom. “Statler,” of course, refers to Statler Hall, the School of Hotel Administration. The name “Statler” is the name of one of the truly great pioneers in the hospitality business, Ellsworth Milton Statler.
Statler opened his first hotel in time for the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo and it was a marvel of modern technology, the first hotel in the country with electric lights and running water in every room. In 1926, for the very first “Hotel Ezra Cornell,” (that is an annual tradition and has been the world’s only “hotel for a weekend,” run and operated totally and completely by the Hotel School’s students since that initial weekend in ‘26) Mr. Statler was invited as the guest of honor. Remember, Cornell was the first college or university in America to offer hotel management as a course and over the years has become the finest school of hospitality management in the world.
At any rate, Mr. and Mrs. Statler showed up in Ithaca for the inaugural HEC and he told his hosts that he never heard of any such thing and that you didn’t go to school to learn the hotel business, you worked in it. Well, that was fine for the moment and Statler went to the Friday dinner and the Saturday seminars and was to be the keynote speaker at the (now traditional) Saturday night banquet. Everybody was holding their collective breath as Mr. Statler stood up, moved to the microphone, looked around and said eight—and only eight—words: “Meek (Howard B. Meek was the director of the program and eventually, when the program became its own school, the first dean) can have any damn thing he wants.” And then he sat down. Stunned at first, the entire audience rose to their feet and poured out a ten minute standing ovation. Statler did not need to say any more and the hotel school was built initially with $9 million bequeathed by the Statler Foundation, with millions more being poured into the school over the ensuing years.
But what happened when I went to work as a banquet waiter that day? The only trays which I had ever carried had been my own in the Biscayne Elementary School, Nautilus Junior High School and Miami Beach High cafeterias, as well as in the Governor, Concord and Biscayne Cafeterias. But that was it. So here I was, dressed in the red Statler waiter’s jacket moving slowly down a line watching four stacks of five plated dinners being put on each of the trays in front of me, with each of the young men lifting the tray and walking swiftly out of the door and into the dining room. I was sweating bullets and my knees were weak. Was I nervous? Hell, no! I was terrified!
I could barely lift the tray and my entire body was shaking like a leaf with the horrific thought that I would probably drop the damn thing, make a fool of myself, and get kicked out. As it turned out, I didn’t and I wasn’t but when I finished that day, my clothes were soaked with sweat and I couldn’t wait to get back to my dorm and get into the shower.` Of course, it did get better but I knew that the restaurant business was not for me. That was not the way it turned out, and I would go on to a wonderful pre-teaching at the college level career running some of the finest clubs and restaurants Miami and New York have ever seen, as a good few of our readers know.
As time went on I was able to get a job as the manager of the Ithaca College Pub and worked there for about a year. I also had to do grunt work at HEC during my first year but stepped up the second year (to what I don’t remember) and by my third and last (my “senior” year, my seventh in college) I had the seniority to become a driver. That job—the most coveted of all—was to drive out to the airport, pick up the incoming VIPs, and take them back to their hotel or to Statler Hall, if that was where they were staying. In addition, we—the drivers—would show them around Ithaca and the campus while having the use of the car for ourselves when not serving as chauffeurs. It was truly enjoyable.
After I left the Ithaca College job I went to work at Cornell’s “Big Red Barn,” an actual barn on campus which was used for parties and functions and it was there that I learned the bartending trade. While having a grand time working there I noticed that the big EAST ITHACA depot name sign from the Lehigh Valley Railroad station of the same name was ensconsed there at the Barn, but basically sitting in a corner, unnoticed and unloved. It was my last year, I had become friendly with the manager of the Big Red Barn and he agreed that the depot sign would have a much better home it I was to take responsibility for it and take care of it henceforth. I did and it did, and is now a part of The Bramson Archive and one of hundreds and hundreds of pieces which I brought or sent home during my three years as a Cornellian.
Those were some tormentious times on campus, the Vietnam era being the worst time in U. S. history to be a college student, the intolerance on both sides probably just about what it is now, but then close to brutal. In any event, I passed both my chem courses in my final year and learned that, indeed, having done that I would be awarded the Bachelor of Science degree from the Hotel School at graduation, June 9, 1969. (I had the date on which I received my acceptance wrong, incidentally, in our last piece to you: the correct date for that momentous event was not June 9, 1966, but, rather June 6, ’66, so it was just three years and three days later that I graduated.) I think that—as I tell my students now—I haven’t made too many mistakes in my life, but the biggest and worst was that, upon graduation, I used ever legitimate excuse—none of which really were—not to go on for my master’s degree. It would be 16 years later, in 1984 when I joined the faculty of St. Thomas University here in Miami that I was afforded the opportunity, as a faculty member, to take the GMAT and begin my studies for my MBA in Health Management, the first of 2 ¾ master’s degrees.
We’ll be back in a few days with more on what happened following graduation, with jobs in Dallas and Atlanta and the return to Miami, meeting a woman so stunningly beautiful that it took my breath away, chasing her for three years until she caught me, going to New York to run the famous New York Gaslight Club, becoming close friends with Henny Youngman and Alan King, returning to Miami to start another hospitality industry career and all the time voraciously collecting rail and trolleyana, Floridiana and Miami memorabilia.
That’s it for now, dear friends. We want you to have a grand weekend, stay well and we’ll “talk to you” (via this written medium of course!) next week.
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