Zion National Park will be holding their 100th Anniversary celebration in 2009 and one of the things they plan to do is invite the old employees back for a reunion. They’re inviting former employees at the Park to contribute their memories. I decided that this is exactly the place to write them. You can see the entire series in under the “Stories and Essays” tab here.

If you worked for Zion Park or one of their concessioners, contact Karen Mayne, Centennial Program Coordinator, at karen_s_mayne@nps.gov or 435-772-0210.

Working in the Zion Lodge Kitchen

Zion Lodge had just burned to the ground and rebuilt in just a few months when I arrived on a Utah Parks bus from Cedar City in the spring of 1966. It was late in May and I was impressed by how warm the day was already. Since I hired on as kitchen help, I reported to the kitchen. I later learned that was the entry job for everybody. If they decided you would work out better somewhere else, you moved from the kitchen. I was moved to the janitor crew in a couple of weeks.

But before that, I worked in the kitchen.

For the first day, the Lodge wasn’t open yet, so they had us doing odd jobs. I remember sitting out on the concrete behind the kitchen scrubbing iron cookware that been salvaged after the fire with sandstone rocks. A moth got stuck on the wet concrete. Within seconds, several black and yellow wasps had descended on the poor moth and seconds after that, all there was left on the concrete was a couple of milk white wings. For some reason, that still stands out in my mind like a photograph.

In those days, the lodge was only open during the summer season and, except for a very few career Utah Parks people, everybody was a high school or college kid there just for the summer. I had a friend who had worked there the previous summer. The stories he brought back made my mouth water. Testosterone stew!

The kitchen was run by older boys who had worked at the lodge before. Some had been coming back every summer for years. Most were in college and they treated us new hires like frat house pledges.

The stoves and food preparation tables were on the up-canyon side of the kitchen and our sinks were on the down-canyon side. The kitchen itself was a single room with a concrete floor. Everything was made of stainless steel. In full production, it was a noisy place.

As I remember it, there were maybe three dishwashers on duty. We were given to understand that our job was really pretty simple. Wash everything that came our way and put it back where it came from. After job #1 was done, we really didn’t have much to do. So during the lunch and dinner rush, we were scrambling. But between times, there was a lot of goofing off.

The busboys would bring loaded trays of dirty dishes and just drop them off. But when the cooks emptied a big pan or something, they would just throw it down the concrete floor at us. Sometimes you had to just get out of the way. And sometimes, the pan was still loaded with some pretty good stuff! If a pan had something yummy in it, we would sometimes kick it aside for later and then pig out with our hands. And sometimes we had some really great food fights. There’s nothing like berry pie in the face at ten paces.

In a lot of ways, I was sad to leave the kitchen after I got promoted – even though I earned four cents an hour more.