Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,68
to his time working beneath the Golden Arches: “I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, when I was flipping burgers at McDonald’s, when I was standing in front of that big Hobart machine washing dishes or waiting tables, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life.”
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Quietly, slowly, subtly, in a country where work is religion, the national fetish over teenagers learning the value of hard work has given way to a fetish over older Americans still contributing economically to society in their golden years. According to a recent Pew study, most retirement-age Americans tend to hold jobs in management, sales, and legal fields. But among the more popular images of graying workers in the United States are that of Walmart greeters, park rangers, and, of course, fast-food workers. The motif of the fast-food semi-retiree is the type of too-irresistible story that ends up becoming a national sensation. In 2017, coverage of Loraine Maurer, a ninety-four-year-old widow and great-grandmother who was being honored for decades of work at a McDonald’s in Evansville, Indiana, noted that she regularly wakes up at three in the morning to make it for her Friday and Saturday shifts that begin at five. Her story inspired such headlines as “A 94-Year-Old Woman Who’s Worked at McDonald’s for 44 Years Is Making the Rest of Us Look Bad” and “Evansville Woman, 94, Still Going Strong 44 Years into McDonald’s Job.” One regular interviewed in a dispatch by a local ABC affiliate cheerily dubbed her “the sunshine of this place.”
But, like Dappen, beneath all of this wondrous cooing is a story about someone feeling cloistered. In one interview, Maurer said that she often mulls retirement in the winter, but would never bring herself to quit because she would get depressed. In another, Maurer told the Evansville Courier & Press that she “would never be a manager because I want to deal with my customers.” She added, “I want to be in contact with them, I don’t want to be behind the lines.”
This touching sentiment is reminiscent of the story of Joel Presson, a ninety-three-year-old worker at a Wendy’s in Oxford, Ohio. Presson started with the chain in 1989, when he was nearly seventy, and as he told the Dayton Daily News in 2014, he resisted the opportunity to become a supervisor there because he felt it was isolating: “I’d been in the food business all my life. They wanted me to go into management, and I said no. I didn’t want to do that because I’d had sixty years of it, and that was enough.” In an echo of both Dappen and Maurer, Presson added, “I don’t like to be lonesome.… I love people. When you lived on a farm during the Depression years, and you didn’t have anybody visiting you except a mule, you swore then you were going to find a place where you could be around people.”
Ultimately, the elderly low-wage worker represents just one tiny droplet in the social lives of American seniors. But in ways that don’t necessarily seem obvious, fast-food chains are also essential to the lives of retirees for reasons far beyond employment. Sociologists frequently refer to gathering spots outside of work and home as “third places.” For the elderly cohort, oftentimes sectioned off by age at places like senior centers, the dining room of a fast-food restaurant is a ready-made community center for intergenerational mingling. The cost of admission is already low—the prices beckon those on fixed incomes—and crucially, the distance for the less mobile is often shorter, particularly in urban centers that are resource strapped or rapidly gentrifying.
Every Friday, local retirees at a Burger King in Oahu are famous for breaking out their ukuleles and guitars for an early-morning kanikapila—a traditional Hawaiian jam session. At the same time, nearly half a world away, seniors at a McDonald’s in Fort Kent, Maine, have become a cult fascination among cardplayers for their marathon sessions of Charlemagne, or Charlie, a weird French-Acadian fusion of bridge and cribbage. “We are sort of like a family,” Judy Levasseur, a Fort Kent regular, told the Bangor Daily News. “If one of us does not show up, we notice and try to make sure they are okay.”
Everywhere in between paradise and the pines, groups assemble in places with year-round climate control to talk about the weather or sports or politics or to gossip over discounted meals. In 2014, a large diplomatic flare-up erupted in Queens, when the management