PRANKS AND PLATES

ABOVE: KITCHEN CREW, 1957

It took a three-day food strike by students to persuade administrators in 1964 to modernize the food service operations at Cheshire Academy. In a direct response to the protest, a professional kitchen manager and staff were soon hired to oversee the dining hall operations.

Senior Class President Robert Svensk ’64 said the protest was long in coming. “The food was rather horrific. We took it upon ourselves to demand improvement.” An appeal to the student council was unsuccessful, Svensk said, so the students took unprecedented action. “In the best tradition of the 60s, we engaged in a peaceful demonstration.”

Peaceful it was, but not uneventful. During an evening meal on the third day of the food strike, hundreds of students again left their meal untouched, Svensk said. “We walked out and chanted, ‘We want food.’ The police received calls [because] we were throwing snowballs into traffic.” The students gathered at the corner of Main Street and Academy Road, some carrying protest signs.

“We were being served the same stuff, like ravioli, four times a week. The students just sat there and wouldn’t eat,” said Buff Crosby ’67. The food went back into the kitchen and soon hundreds of boys were chanting their grievances under a winter night’s sky. The protest ended, according to several students who were there, when a school administrator confronted the boys with the words, “that will be enough.”

The protesters were told to gather in Memorial Auditorium (now part of the Watch Factory Shoppes). Headmaster Arthur Sheriff addressed the students. “He told us things would change,” Crosby said. Sheriff kept his word. In less than six months, the Academy hired the Slater Corporation of the Automatic Retailers of America, making it the first professional food service company in the school’s history.

At the time of the strike, the kitchen and dining hall were located on the first floor of Hurley Hall. The students and a dorm master sat at assigned tables for lunch and dinner, which were served family style. Don Scott ’62, remembers the custom. He said all of the pupils were required to serve as a waiter on a rotating basis. They would get in the serving line outside the kitchen window, Scott recalled, and be given a large tray full of food platters. The tray was carried to the table and placed on a folding stand. The food was then dished out by the dorm master onto individual plates or bowls.

Behind-the-scene tasks such as readying the food trays and washing dishes by hand were given to scholarship students who were called the “kitchen crew.” Sometimes referred to as “work study,” the students were required to arrive 15 minutes before mealtime.

RICHARD LEWIS GRANT '69

Serving on the kitchen crew wasn’t easy. “I would spend an hour in the kitchen after the meals ended. There was no forgiveness,” said Bill Eddy ’61. “You got up and did your kitchen work and then you’d do your school work. The other students had free time after the meals.” Despite being a scholarship recipient, Eddy said, he wasn’t treated any differently by his peers. “I was just one of the guys.”

Senior Master Emeritus Bevan Dupre ’69 had work study duties throughout his four years at the Academy. As was the case for many boarding students in the 1960s, Dupre’s dorm was not on campus, but several blocks away near the Cheshire Public Library on Main Street.

“I had to be in the kitchen by 6:45am, so I had to be out the door at 6:00am.” Dupre recalled. “I had to walk to school in the dark.” His non-scholarship peers could sleep until 6:00am or later. “Sometimes I would fall asleep at my desk during evening study hall, especially after sports,” he added.

Being on the kitchen crew did have its perks, if your timing was right, said Crosby. “If you went to the kitchen around 10:00am, you could grab a jelly donut. They were fresh and hot.” If the baker, known as “Scotty” (John Scott Lynch) knew the student, he was in luck.

Some members of the kitchen crew, including Svensk, helped make the donuts. “That is my most vivid memory. There was a vat with jelly and a machine with a lever and you pushed it and the jelly would go through a metal tube into the donut.”

From 1940 until the early ’60s, a notable pair of chefs ruled the Cheshire Academy kitchen. Gaston Bourgeois, the head chef, and his assistant, Roger Sardine, were a dependable, if eccentric, presence at meals. Eddy remembers their encounters, especially when he needed to borrow something from the kitchen. “We had to sneak in there to get the knives. Gaston and Roger were very possessive. They would say, ‘I brought these knives from the old country.’”

“Gaston was always jolly,” said Stathis Orphanos ’58. “Had Walt Disney ever met them, I'm certain that he would have been inspired to create animated versions of them (as palace chefs?) in one of his films.” He said Sardine, “was high strung, a perfectionist, prone to temper tantrums, and, I seem to remember, had a snit one day and quit but then returned to the kitchen later that afternoon.” Student pranks could also upset mealtime. Rick LaCrosse ’68 remembers when the Gideon Welles Dining Hall opened in the old gym in 1967. “We would hurl forks toward the ceiling as hard as we could. One out of three would stick. You’d be sitting there having lunch and a fork would land on your table.”

Student waiters also had a knack for causing some mischief, Eddy said. One prank involved stacking the not-quite-empty soup bowls on top of each other. “When you handed them through the window to the student doing dishes, you’d push down on all of the bowls and splash soup all over the other student,” he said. If a student was working in the dish room, “they knew when waiters took dishes to the window, to not stand too close.” The trick worked particularly well with tomato soup, Eddy added.

Dupre remembers a messy rebellion that occurred in his senior year. He said there was a blizzard, and for some reason, the students were required to check into the Arthur Sheriff Field House. “There were no windbreaks and there was a gale-force wind. We were then told to go to dinner.” Ironically, ice cream was being served. “The ringleaders whispered to the other students to not eat the ice cream. Instead, they said, ‘When the bell goes, the ice cream goes.’” When the dinner bell was rung, the students flung the ice cream cups up to the ceiling. “First went the ice cream, then the plates, glasses, and knives started flying. Stuff was shattering on the tables,” Dupre said. The melee was stopped, he added, by the administrator on duty, Col. Hugh Cash, who rang the dinner bell again and yelled “dismissed!”

Despite the pranks and protests, the dining hall meals were part of a wellhoned machine that in the 60s served as many as 800 day and boarding students. As is the case with most shared meals, there is a cultural aspect to gathering around a table together. Because they served as waiters, Dupre noted, students learned how to set a table, how to clear the dishes and the amount of work that’s required to prepare and serve a meal.