Chapter 05 - The Business Grows; Disaster Strikes

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In the new addition, started only months after the first hotel was finished, the original kitchen and pantry area was converted to dining room space, making this facility capable of seating fifty or more diners at one time. A huge new kitchen and pantry was added to the rear. This included a large pastry table and baked goods area, for fresh bread, pies and cakes were a daily routine. The new annex also provided space on the second floor -for several new hotel rooms.

Surprisingly enough, this new dining room was frequently filled to capacity, and "second tables" were re - set for overflow crowds. This occurred particularly on Sundays, when some of the towns people would drop in for Sunday dinner, - which was always special. Meals were served "American", or family style. Each table, and there were seven or eight of them of various sizes, would seat six to eight persons. At meal time the center piece of each table always consisted of a sugar bowl, cream pitcher, salt and pepper, bottle each of catsup, Lea & Perrins, A-1, mustard, vinegar, a pound of butter, a container of tea spoons, and a container of paper napkins folded V - shape. Plates were placed bottom up with knife and fork on either side at each chair. Not until the dinner bell was sounded at the hotel entrance and the booted patrons started trooping in would the waitresses start bringing in the stemming hot food in large serving dishes; and these dishes were re-filled until every person at a given table had partaken of all he could stagger away with. Considering the fact that during most of the year, the menus had to be made up of canned or dried staples, the meals were quite diversified. However, breakfast was invariably the same, consisting of all the following: oatmeal or cornmeal mush, fried or hash brown potatoes, sour-dough hot cakes, quantities of thick cut bacon, fried eggs and stewed dried fruit. After breakfast the butcher, Johnnie Ginchman, would drop by the kitchen to discuss with the cook the cuts of meat he could supply in sufficient quantities to fill the hotel order for the day. Dinner (noon) was started with a bowl of soup, followed by the meat and potato entree with two or three other vegetables, and a desert of a fifth of a large pie. (No meal was ever served without potatoes in some form.) At supper (6:00 P.M.) a meat entree, which might be anything from hash to Porter-house steaks, was accompanied by at least three vegetables, with a desert of fruit and cake. Both dinner and supper were usually supplemented by some dish involving macaroni, spaghetti, vermicelli, rice or beans. Coffee, tea, milk, bread etc. were served without limit. The waste of food was appalling. For lack of sufficient cool storage facilities no left - overs were ever saved, be it a cup full or a gallon. All left overs, together with the normal table scraps were fed to a small pen of hogs maintained out back and beyond the hotel and there was enough of this kitchen garbage to keep several pigs in fine fettle.

The foregoing account of food meals at the old hotel has been detailed to emphasize a more interesting point. All of this food, except the meats, had to be imported over the old stage road by freight team, increasing its cost considerably - on some items almost doubling the cost. Yet, the price of any meal was fifty cents, - no more, no less! And "regular boarders", those who took a room and three meals a day, got a flat rate of one dollar per day. And the business was still profitable enough to finance further expansion of the enterprise.