Waitress outshined surroundings

It was, without a doubt, the worst hotel in South Bend.
That much was clear when we checked into our room. A black smoke stain covered about a third of the ceiling. There’d been a fire, and it looked as if it had been recent.
Then again, we knew the hotel had already been slated for demolition as part of an urban renewal project, so we hadn’t been expecting much.
The occasion was the fall meeting of the Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors. The year was 1978, and it was just the second IAPME meeting Connie and I had attended.
We’d found the group congenial and welcoming. The size of a newspaper’s market didn’t seem to matter. Neither did the number of years you’d been employed in a newsroom. Everyone was an equal, from the Indianapolis Star to The Commercial Review.
That was particularly true when it came to Jack Powers, a wonderful Irish Catholic Notre Dame graduate who was managing editor of The South Bend Tribune. Jack and his wife Barbara had practically adopted us at our first meeting, so when Jack said his paper was hosting the fall meeting in South Bend we had to be there.
There, it turned out, was a joint called the Town Towers. It would be a compliment to call it seedy. It was worse than seedy.
Jack Powers was embarrassed by the place and kept apologizing all weekend. Urban renewal hadn’t moved at the pace he had hoped; it would be a few more years before the promised new downtown hotel materialized.
But the site didn’t really matter. In fact, the rundown nature of the place — which extended to every aspect of the hospitality industry — became a running joke throughout the meeting.
The final punchline came at the Sunday brunch.
The group of editors clearly made up the vast majority of the hotel’s guests. In fact, there may have been no one else staying at the Town Towers. But there were still about 75 editors and spouses and AP staff members on hand for the brunch. We filled the small ballroom with several tables.
And there was one waitress.
Throughout that morning’s program, which honored a high school journalism adviser from Yorktown, the audience marveled at the waitress’s performance.
She moved briskly, efficiently and tirelessly from table to table. No coffee cup ever emptied without a fresh cup being offered.
She wasn’t a young woman. She’d obviously waited on tables much of her adult life. And she was a pro.
Even the speaker paused on at least one occasion to appreciate the job she was doing.
There was, as I recall, a round of applause for the waitress before the group departed. And there was, I am sure, one heck of a tip left behind.
The Town Towers came down several months later, falling to the wrecking ball. But it didn’t matter by then.
Its finest moment had passed that Sunday morning when the world’s hardest-working waitress did her thing.