Salad Days
Great moments in building history: So much for dining at the White House
My dad always wanted my brothers and me to amount to something. In the early 1960s, when I landed a job building exhibits for the Smithsonian, I thought I’d made the big time. I was working in Washington, D. C. Today the Smithsonian, tomorrow the White House.
But with three kids in high school and a wife eyeballing high society, I had to moonlight to make ends meet. Working nights and weekends, I mostly built rec rooms in the unfinished basements of government employees’ homes.
One time a job came along that would allow me to work outdoors, and I was glad to get it. A government employee and his family lived in a house with a walk-out basement. There’s always a problem landscaping these kinds of houses, such as how to handle the 8 ft. of elevation between the front and back yards.
This government employee made good money, so his wife had me tier five stone planters on the embankment and include stone steps coming down the center of the planters, sort of like the hanging gardens of Babylon. This required 100 ft. or more of frostproof footers, a generous pile of concrete block, wall ties, rebar, sand, mortar and gallons of water. I laid 21 tons of green Pennsylvania sandstone. This amount of work required a lot of steam in the boiler, and this is where I got into trouble.
At 6 a.m. one Saturday, a tiny, refined voice called down from the carport to where I was mixing mortar.
“Mr. Kennedy, would you like to eat lunch here today,” the woman of the house asked.
Laying down the mortar hoe, I looked up. “Well, I guess so,” I answered. I had never been in their house and barely knew the folks. Any business that had been transacted was done on the carport.
“Okay,” she said. Then she disappeared back inside the house.
Five hours, six hours, seven hours rolled by. After all that work, I was getting extremely hungry. Finally, that dainty voice again: “Mr. Kennedy, come and eat.” By then I was so famished I could hardly lift the mortar hoe, crack another rock or climb up the hillside to the kitchen.
When I entered the kitchen, I didn’t smell a thing to eat, no meat or potatoes, and my client’s wife was doing a task at the sink. I sat down at the table. There were no dishes or silver on the table, only a salad and a big fork.
This salad was the nicest bowl of fixings I had ever seen. At the top were five cherries arranged like mountain climbers in a mound of cottage cheese. Then, on the downslope, five shrimp stuck out. Other edibles such as stuffed olives, croutons, cherry tomatoes, onion slices, sprouts and other greens trailed down to the rim of the bowl, which was nicely embroidered with leaf lettuce and sliced hard-boiled eggs.
While I sat there, the wife was puttering around at the sink. So I took the big fork and dug into the salad. About the time I was halfway through eating the salad, she slid over and opened the oven door. Inside were five steaming pot pies and five bowls of beans. Then she opened the basement door and called the rest of the family upstairs: “Herb, girls, come up and eat.”
Great balls of lightning! I nearly swallowed the fork as I realized the salad I’d devoured was meant for five people. When she came over to the table, she pretended the salad I’d consumed never existed. She put the empty bowl in the sink, pondered the refrigerator, then put together four skimpy salads.
When I got home at sundown and told my wife, Dawn, about what I had done, she wanted to pack up and clear out of Washington that evening. Right then, I realized I’d never dine at the White House.
—Clyde R. Kennedy, Rushville, Ohio
Drawing by: Jackie Rogers
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