Mabel Gelman
Gelman's Café
Widow of owner and waitress and cashier of Gelman's Café
Greenwood, MS
CLOSED
I always thought that being a waitress was beneath me. You know? In 1946? Women didn't work much as waitresses. And the first cup of coffee I sold--it was like to kill me. But I got used to it, and I--I began to like it. – Mabel Gelman
In the first half of the twentieth century, Jews became an integral part of the merchant class of the South, and Greenwood was no exception. With one of the last orthodox synagogues in the state, this Delta town was once a hotbed of Jewish culture, and the Gelman family quickly established itself by running various cafes over the years. Early on, the Gelman family ran the Paramount Inn that was next to the old Paramount Theater in downtown Greenwood. In 1946, Myer Gelman and his brother opened Gelman's café on Howard Street, where Myer's wife, Mabel, worked the front of the house for seventeen years as a waitress and cashier. Their story is the story of Jews in Mississippi, but it is also the story of a time in this part of the Delta when a place like Gelman's Café had so much regular business that they kept track of the number of cups of coffee sold in a year. As Mabel tells it, Myer created a sign of sorts out of tin, which he kept on display above the booths in the café. At the end of each day he would add to the tally, and one year they were astonished to find that they had sold more than 100,000 cups of coffee to their friends and neighbors. A lot can happen over a cup of coffee, and some of those stories are still being told. And while Gelman's Café is long gone, Mabel's stories remind us what it's like to know your neighbor and be part of a community.
What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
SUBJECT: Mabel Gelman,
GELMAN'S CAFE. Widow of owner/ waitress & cashier.
DATE: June 11, 2003
LOCATION: Golden Age Nursing Home in Greenwood
INTERVIEWER: Amy Evans
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Amy Evans: Now, um, we could just start by you telling us, um, you opened Gelman's Café with your husband?
Mabel Gelman: Um, my husband got out of the service and his mother and his sister and his other sisters all were marvelous cooks, and they had run a little small restaurant. So he needed a job and they just said well, let's just open up another restaurant. So he opened up. Some of them called it Gelman's restaurant; some of them called it Gelman's Café. Opened it up in 1949 [pause] and closed it in 1963.
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So, what was the first café that his family opened before?
She had a --You know, it's been a long time since I've been to town, so I don't know but on, uh, Washington Street--yeah, Washington Street--there was a picture show called the Paramount. I don't know if that old building is still there or not [clears throat]. It's not a picture show, but I don't know if the building is still there. And next door to it his family had a little small café called the Paramount--the same as the picture show.
And what kind of restaurant was that?
Hamburgers, hot dogs, and I--I know my mother-in-law said, uh, it was a small place. I know my mother-in-law said more love affairs happened over the tables in the Paramount Inn than any other place she knew because it was kind of a meetin' place for couples. Huh!...Yeah, so when he [Meyer Gelman] got out of the service, he and his brother went into partnership on Howard Street
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Did you have much say-so in the restaurant?
Me? No. Um, for one thing, there was a partner. And the partner had a--well, I'll just be giving you the truth--an over-bearing wife, and his mother had put a little money in the café. So, I was just there. An extra wheel. And, of course, I worked there just like I was--I always thought that being a waitress was beneath me. You know? In 1946? Women didn't work much as waitresses. And the first cup of coffee I sold--it was like to kill me. But I got used to it, and I--I began to like it.
It's hard work too. It takes a talent.
Oh, it's hard. It killed my husband. He had, uh, massive heart attack and he had to give up. [Pause] Well, the hours were long. They opened up at four-thirty in the morning, between the two, uh, they closed at eleven at night and had two shifts. So, two brothers would take a shift. And then when, uh, my brother-in-law died, my husband worked himself. His sister, Joe Maritn's [Mrs. Gelman's nephew who lives in Greenwood] mother, would come down and help, and he'd go home and sleep and come back. So, it was just hard on him. Real hard. It's the hardest business you can have. Yeah.
How many employees did y'all have?
How many employees? Let me see. We had about four waitresses, and we had a short-order cook, a regular cook, uh [pause] somebody who made desserts, and a bus boy. About seven or eight. Plus, I worked. And his sister came down in the afternoon and worked. Joe's mother came down a lot and worked. Joe has worked [laughs]. Joe's daddy worked. Uh, we used to have a, a lot of uh rush spells, uh, like a football team. Or at that time, the school was only a few blocks away. So we'd have a rush of school kids. So we'd get--But, it was a, it was a family business.
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And so did your husband learn to cook from [his mother]? Did he cook?
Yeah. He was a very good cook. Very good cook. And he was also pretty good in the kitchen about, uh, ordering sides of beef and cuttin' it up into smaller portions. Had a big, uh, block, you know, and he could make steaks out of it. And I'm talking about a whole side [of beef] that he would buy. So, he was a good cook.
So was he involved in the cafe before y'all got married?
Well, it was only open two or three months before we got married. But he helped his mother in the--when she had that little Paramount Inn...But he--he was a good cook. And he liked to cook. And had a good, uh, sense of taste. Uh, when I eat something, if it lacks salt, I can tell ya. But if it lacks something else, I can't say this lacks so-and-so and so-and-so. But he could eat something and he's say, "This lacks something." And he could tell you what it was, but I can't do that. [Laughs]
So did you not do any cooking in the cafe?
No. I didn't do any cooking. I did cashiering, and I did waiting on the tables--after so long a time. [Laughs]
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And did you serve breakfast, dinner and supper?
Breakfast--Well, we started of serving breakfast, dinner and supper--dinner and supper, uh, would be a meal on the menu. But then, business dropped off at night, so we just served a la carte at night. And a la carte at breakfast. But we did serve dinners. Yeah, those were the days. [Laughs]
Now, you said you had some real good cooks. Did they add some of their own things to the menu, or did you have them--
Oh yeah, I'm sure they did. We had somebody could make the best cornbread you ever saw, and we had somebody that could make the best biscuits you ever saw. And they were good cooks. They really were good cooks. All black, but they were good cooks. We had, um, one--two men and about three women, and then we had all women. But we had some good men cooks.
What other kind of stuff did you have on the menu?
Oh. Breakfast, the usual: pancakes, bacon, sausage, eggs, cereal if you wanted, uh, out of a box. We didn't ser--make corn, uh--oatmeal or, uh, cream of wheat. Grits. For dinner, we would have, um, let's see. A meat. Could be, uh, beef tips with noodles, could be stuffed cabbage, could be, um, what do you call it? Veal cutlets. Some kind of chicken. Could be braised ribs. Just almost anything you would have at home. And two vegetables. Uh, there were two--there were two wholesale houses here where you could buy, uh, fresh produce. And he'd go out there and buy the produce. And then there were tow meat companies here: Swift and Armor, I think it was. Or Murrell, I can't remember. And he would get his meat from there, besides ordering it when we got a big side from somewhere. And we ordered coffee from St. Louis. Didn't use any name-brand coffee but just--somebody in St. Louis that did nothing but make coffee, and that's what kind of coffee we used. And sometimes he'd add, um, Kroger's ground coffee [laughs] to it, you know, make it--see if he could make it taste better. [Laughs] So.
Um, do I remember something when we spoke before about a board that...Mr. Gelman would keep.
Uh, the board was about as big as that, uh, piece to the left over there. [Mrs. Gelman points to the wall across from her.]
That bulletin board? [The bulletin board is about three feet tall by five feet wide.]
Yeah. It was made of tin. I don't know where he got it, but he painted on it something like "As of," and then he made a clock, uh, that he could move the hands himself. And under the clock was "That many cups" that we had sold. And, uh, well as of--no the date wasn't on there. And every--we kept a record on the tickets that we gave, 'cause everybody got a ticket when--you know, a bill. So--at either once a day or twice a day, he'd count the tickets and, uh, he'd change the board. And I think by the end of the year, one time--it was over a hundred thousand cups.
My goodness.
But you see, at that time, everything in Greenwood was around Howard Street. Um, uh, wh--uh, within that area. Nothing was on the highway. No McDonald's, no Churches [Fried Chicken] or anything. So everybody worked in that area, and when they had a coffee break, they'd come to Gelman's or around the corner to Alice [Cafe], or there was a Post Office Cafe. But they're gone now. The Post Office Cafe is now the Alluvian [Hotel]. That was--that was way back yonder.
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And can you describe the way the cafe looked a little bit? 'Cause it's no longer there.
Well, let's see. Uh, the outside, uh, was big slabs of black tile. And we had octagon-shaped windows. And inside had a counter on the left and two, uh, what do you call it? Counter benches. On the opposite side was about six booths. And the inside--and the middle was like six tables. So we could s--feed about [pause]--if four people sat at the table and four in the booth, maybe about fifty, uh, some at a time. So, uh, it was nice. It was, uh, not fancy, but it was--it was home-like. [Laughs] you know, kind of home-like.
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Did you enjoy your work at Gelman's Cafe?
I didn't at first. I didn't at first because--I don't know why, but down deep and down inside of me I thought, when I got married, that I'd find some other kind of job. That I thought--well--to be frank, I thought that if you couldn't do anything else, you could be a waitress. Or at--maybe at one time a telephone operator. I don't know why that was in my mind. But I married somebody in the restaurant business, and pretty soon I became a waitress. The hardest part of being a waitress was when my so-called friends left me a tip. I just couldn't hardly stand it. I--I--I felt like they think I'm--I don't know. I can't explain it. But I just hated to take tips from people that I knew. [Laughs] At Christmas time, uh, we started something, uh, we put up a small Christmas tree, and whoever wanted too could donate a dollar. And we'd put it on the tree instead of a decoration. And by the time Christmas came, each one of the waitresses had about fifty or sixty dollars, 'cause it was about two hundred, tow hundred fifty dollars on the tree. People didn't tip then for a ten cent--for a five-cent cup of coffee. But, uh, for a dinner now, they'd leave a little small tip. But then Christmas time, they'd give these waitresses a dollar. [Laughs]
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We had some good waitresses. [Pause] This--just all kinds. [Laughs] Just all kinds of waitresses. And then of course, times that, uh, the blacks were beginning to, uh, want to come into the t--uh, you know--to the places. And when--well, first of all my husband had a heart attack, and it was getting too hard for him. And then, we would loose a lot of customers if we hired black girls. At the beginning. Today it's different.
As waitresses, you're talking about?
As waitresses. Today it's--it's different. You can have anybody, you know, working. So, uh, when he had that heart attack, we closed up in, uh, sixty--sixty-three. Forty-six to sixty-three. And that's it. [Laughs]
Are you saying you closed up before you really had to deal with much with the civil rights changes that happened in Greenwood?
Well, in a way. Except for the fact that he got sick. And--you just don't know how hard the restaurant is. You got to get up early, you got to stay up late. You got to run, uh, the kitchen, you got to run the waitresses. You have to do the buying, and you have to do, um, the supervising, and it was just too much for him. Especially when you had to open--open up so early. And had to do it by himself. Uh, I helped him, but that--that's--I had to stay home some with my children too. I mean, I could go home and not come back at night. And if he went home, his sister would come down and help. But he had to come back. He closed up. He cut the hours back. Instead of opening up at four-thirty, he might of opened up at five--five-thirty. You had to get up early because your milkman, your bread man, and your produce man would make deliveries early, and if you weren't there they'd leave it in the door. And it--you can't trust leavin' it--three big--a big sack of potatoes that tall [Mrs. Gelman holds her hand up about three feet from the floor] and leave it in the door and hope it's be there if you came at eight. But I don't know how they do now. Uh, now I think--I don't think anybody delivers that early. I don't know how early the milkman comes now. But then it was like four-thirty.
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And how did you hire folks back then?
How did we hire them? They came in for--you know, for an application. And if--if you thought they looked all right, you hired them. And we've had some funny ones. We've had some funny ones. We had one [clicks her tongue] one time that, uh, if the health inspector wasn't there, they would take a cup of coffee and put another cup of coffee on top of it, which is against the health laws. And if she would--would drop it, and Mr.--my husband would go up to her and say, "Lynez, what happened?" "I didn't do that!" she says. "The cup just jumped off of the saucer!" [Laughs] Uhe--uhe--uhe--uhe [Laughing] Oh, it was just so funny.
Do you have any other funny memories like that from the restaurant?
Well, you asked me once before--any funny customers. I told you we had, um, a young man who's still in Greenwood--quite a big, uh, businessman now--that ordered, uh, milk shakes or malted milks at dinner--vanilla--and he'd put ketchup in it so that nobody would ask him for a swallow. [Laughs] Then we had another one that was a banker that, uh, always had a bowl of soup and a, uh, a bottle of beer. And he would put, uh, a good amount of his beer in his soup. We had a lawyer that ate with us--craaazy about turnip greens. Jut loved turnip greens. And he'd say, "Save me the likker." You know, that's the juice. He said, "I'll be back at night for cornbread and likker." And every night--he was separated from his wife--every night he' come back and that was his supper: cornbread and likker. [Laughs] You know, crumbled it up. And I guess it, uh--the usual. Salt on things that maybe you would put sugar on, or sugar on things that you would put salt on. Had a hard time with the kids. Uh, everything was loose, us, sugar was loose in a little--little silver bowl. They'd put salt in the sugar bowl. Um, ketchup came out of the bottle. Sugar--I mean, salt came out of--and pepper came out of a slat shaker. Uh, jelly--I don't think we served jelly because at that time they didn't put it up in individual packages. But we had, uh, we did have cartons of milk. You could buy a small carton of milk. [clicks her tongue] Or ice cream. [Laughs] Them were the days. [Laughs] Uh.
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And you said somebody came in and had soup and--and beer. Did y'all serve beer?
Oh, yeah. Not liquor.
Mm-hmm.
But we could serve beer. Yeah. But you had to have a special license. You had to have a beer license. Of course, we didn't serve any mixed drinks. We did have, uh, a party every Christmas Eve for our customers. We would lay out a real, real--we'd take two or three big tables and put 'em together, and of course I'd bring a tablecloth from home. [Sound of someone sneezing again out in the hallway] Uh, I would either bake cookies or buy cookies and raisins and nuts--candy. But my husband would make eggnog--real eggnog--in a greaaat big punch bowl. I bought a punch bowl with twelve cups. And we served, uh--what you call it--eggnog every Christmas Eve. And we had a lot of customers. All the customers that came for coffee would come back Christmas Eve and come to the party. And then, it came out in the paper that eggs were not as safe as they should be. You know, raw eggs? So I think right before we got ready to close up--maybe a year or two--we stopped having that Christmas party...[Laughs] No, but that was good eggnog. You could eat it with a spoon. And put a little [pause] kick to it. [Laughs]
[Laughing]
Oh. But that--that was allowable once a year. Nobody else said anything.
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Did the [Gelman] family meet--eat a lot of their meals at the restaurant?
Uh, sometimes. But the whole family were good cooks. Every one of them was a good cook. And my s--Mrs. Goldberg had three daughters, so she would go home and her husband--she'd go home and cook for them. Mary and my mother-in-law would come to the restaurant about six o'clock at night and stay till closing. My mother-in-law would stay in the kitchen. Mary would stay and cashier. What my mother-in-law would do [clicks her tongue], she would check the lettuce and be sure that they didn't throw away the good part of the lettuce. She would peel off what didn't look good, and put the head back in the kitchen--I mean, in the refrigerator. That's what I'm saying. If you run a restaurant, you've got to have somebody there that will save you money. Or else it will go out the door. Or in the garbage. She would, uh, clean up celery, she would check tomatoes. She would stay in the kitchen--no cooking!--because she was strictly kosher. She kept a kosher kitchen at home. But she would take care of the things that were perishable to see that they could be used and not thrown away. 'Cause if--you could leave it to someone in the kitchen and--and if there were a couple of brown leaves on the lettuce, they'd throw it in the garbage. She would peel it off and put it up.
What was the Jewish community like here in Greenwood in the fifties?
All right. Uh, when I first got married, it was the next Sunday--I got married one Sunday, and the next Sunday was one of the big holidays. And I went to the synagogue. It was packed--uh, expect a hundred people could sit in there--and it was packed. The doors to the auditorium were open--there were chairs where you could, uh, out in chairs for the extra people. And when I waked in there and he--they--Meyer said this is Mrs. So-and-so, and this is Mrs. So-and-so, I thought well, I'll never learn who all these people are. I mean there's so many! So packed! Sixty children in the Sunday school. Then as time went by, the congregation got less and less, the children grew up. We drew, uh, members from s--other towns. Indianola would come here, Moorehead would come here, uh, Itta Bena would come here, Wynona would come here. So it wadn't just Greenwood. Well anyway, the children grew up, would go to school, and wouldn't come to work in Greenwood. Or maybe Mississippi. Very few children who are adults now, stayed in Greenwood. Now [today] this congregation has about--there might be some paying members that don't come because they're too old, or they don't live in town. But in town, there are only about five or six men, uh, two or three children, and that's all. Where it used to be over a hundred. But little towns have changed. Nobody moves in here. Nobody moves to Greenwood.
And were there a lot of kosher Jewish families in town?
My--my mother-in-law kept kosher. And my two sister-in-laws kept kosher. Mrs. Goldberg kept kosher. Well, she didn't get married until seven years after we--after I got married. But I mean, strictly kosher--they did. And that was all. 'Course now, young Mrs. Goldberg, who's a grandmother, still keeps kosher. That's the one that owns Goldberg's shoe store. She still keeps kosher. Oh, yes. We had somebody here that would make the meat and the chickens kosher. And the way the--the diet was, you either served a meat diet or a dairy diet. You didn't serve both at the same tale. So, they were pretty strict. The older people did. There might have been more than that when I first came. But like I say, when the old people--when my mother-in-law died [clicks her tongue], we tried to keep kosher, but we were on payday to payday--livin'. 'Cause we were just, you know, getting started, and it was kinda hard to make a living. And keeping kosher was very expensive. Now people that keep kosher says that's not an excuse, but to us it was an excuse--to have to order meat and keep kosher. So we still could eat in the restaurant what we wanted, when at home we didn't keep kosher anymore. I had three sets of dishes. I had one for meat, one for, uh, milk, and I had one what I could mix. [Laughs] I have a cousin in Texas that keeps strictly, strictly kosher. She has--she'll tell you she's got meat dishes, meat--meat dishes, dairy dishes and dishes for Mexican food. [Laughs]
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Well, y'all closed the restaurant in sixty-three--
Uh-huh.
And you just retired after that?
Oh, no. No! Uh, we went across the street and, uh, my brother-in-law opened up a men's store and, uh, a ladies shoe department. That building's burned now. It was on the corner. And we kept that from sixty-three to seventy-five.
What was that called?
The Leader. And then, uh, after that closed, we went--I went to, uh, what was called the Fashion Shop, and my husband went to the courthouse and worked in the tax office until he died. So--people think well, you had a lot of jobs. But in--forty-five or fifty years, three jobs is not a lot. You know? It's--it's, uh, the restaurant, the store and for him the tax office, and for me the dress shop.
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When you all left the restaurant, what happened to the cafe itself?
Barrett's drugstore was on the corner and they bought--we rented. It wadn't our building, and we rented it. And Barrett's bought the building, and he--we sold the restaurant, not the building. And he took all of the equipment and sent it to French Camp, which is a--a camp for, uh, either underprivileged or hard to handle--I don't know if it was any girls there--hard to handle boys. And it was a--oh my goodness! It was a--tables and chairs and refrigerators and stoves and steam tables and--and, uh, at that time no washing--no dishwashers. Uh, three big long--three big sinks, took almost from the wall to the clock [Mrs. Gelman points to a wall in the room where we are sitting. From the corner of the wall to the clock is about eight feet]. Uh, one for washing, one for rinsing, and one for sanitizing. And he even--that--he took all--gave all that away to French Camp.
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Well, do you have any additional--final thoughts about the restaurant?
No, no. Except, the only thought that I--that I have is how different life is in the restaurant now, than it was then. Uh, so--so many fast foods. So many fast foods. And there were no fast foods when we opened up. And how price-wise things are so different. And I'm not sure--I don't know what the health department des anymore, but you can have waitresses with the fanciest hairdos, you know. You don't ever see their head covered with a hairnet. It's just--it's just a--a different world. It's just a different world.
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