Post #17: Head waiter

Ithaca, New York
Early fall 1937

Dear Folks,

I received Aunt Dorothy’s interesting card yesterday and will look forward to the letter. This has been quite a busy week for me and next week will be too. I have to give farm practice tests temporarily whenever I have free time, which isn’t too much as I am working from 11 to 1:30 as head waiter at the Coop on the noon shift every day and have much more work than last year.

We are serving about 175 people now and will be serving nearly 200 after all the members begin to eat. I dish out all the individual meals alone, or if it is an extra heavy meal I have someone to help me. This takes about an hour of fast work and then I have to help set up first and clean up afterword. It leaves me only 10 minutes to make my lab but I guess I’ll get along somehow. I’ve got all eight o’clock classes, so I get up in good time in the morning, also Saturday classes.

Yesterday I listened to part of the Cornell vs. Colgate game over the radio. They had about 20,000 people here to see it and the traffic was something awful. Everybody including the coach was amazed that we should win by such a lopsided score of 40 to 7. They are looking forward to a good year. I walked down from the campus yesterday afternoon with President Day’s wife; we both happened to come onto the sidewalk at the same time and she started talking to me about the game. She said that President Day and Dean Ladd of the Agriculture College had been to Albany that day and had hurried back to see the game.

In the poultry course I am in, we have the largest number of students that was ever grouped together in one room at Cornell University to study poultry. I think I am going to like my other courses real well too. Remember me to Teddy and the kitten. This house is a hundred percent improvement over the one I was in last year. We have a large lounging room downstairs with a telephone which any of us can use. There’s plenty of noise, but that doesn’t bother me much. I have to go up to the Coop to a meeting now so will mail this.

Lovingly, Hall