OXFORD MISSISSIPPI

Ole Miss Cooks - Home

HOUSES
Alpha Omicron Pi
Laura Reid

Kappa Alpha
Patricia Brown
Treber McGuirt
Ruth Miller

Kappa Sigma
Johnny Brown
Jean Foster
Sarah Frison

Sigma Chi
Willette Booker Mechille Ivy

Sigma Nu
Ethel Lockhart
Sandra Petties Georgia Wise

RETIRED
Verlean Caruthers
Fairy Bell Hewlett Mary Alice Lewis
Ollie Vaughn

---

This project was made possible by a grant from the Mississippi Humanities Council

Project Contributors:
John Hunter Allgood, John T. Edge, Amy Evans, Mary Beth Lasseter and Kendra Myers

---

more...

Georgia Wise, House Mother

“I hope that I am able to physically continue this work because it is really enjoyable, and a house director’s job is ninety percent food and ten percent ‘call the plumber, call the locksmith, call the electrician.’ I feel like a live-in caterer and it is a lot of fun. And as long as the boys are full, [and] no one is going to be hungry.”

--Georgia Wise

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.

HOUSE: Sigma Nu Fraternity at The University of Mississippi
SUBJECT: Georgia Wise, House Mother
DATE: April 21, 2004
LOCATION: Sigma Nu House
INTERVIEWER: John Hunter Allgood

John Hunter Allgood: This is John Hunter Allgood on 4-21-04 interviewing Mrs. Georgia, Sigma Nu House Mother. Could you please tell me you full name, how to spell it, and where you are from?

Georgia Wise: My name is Georgia Wise, w-i-s-e, and I grew up in Hazlehurst.

Can you tell me how you came to be here in the Sigma Nu house.

This is my third year at the Sigma Nu house; I was a sorority house mother at the University of Alabama for six years prior to this, and before that I was in the catering and restaurant business for about twenty years. And it is very different, the food situation is very different between fraternities and sororities, and at Alabama the work load just got a little too heavy. When this job offer came along I decided to make a change. This difference between Alabama and Old Miss is that at Ole Miss everybody goes to the grove and at Alabama the sorority houses have open house luncheons every home ball game. So I was virtually working six days a week without a break and I got tired of it; bottom line I got tired of it [laughs].

So was it really just the work load?

It was the work load and also the difference in the pay, and the difference in the time freedom. Cause these sorority houses require that you be there every night with on weekend off every month that you are allowed to not be there, physically, on the property. And, I don’t have to baby-sit at a frat house, I can more time freedom.

So if started in the catering business, what got you into that?

Well, I have a degree in theater arts, and when I graduated form college, the University of Alabama in seventy one, I wanted to go to New York and be an actress. And I did that for a lot of years. Everybody who is in the arts in New York City, every body who waits tables or bartends or serves catered functions is an ‘actor slash bartender’, ‘actor slash waitress’, so I became real interested in regional cooking. Having grown up in the south and only pretty much known New Orleans style cooking but also soul food, it was fascinating to me to be in a more sophisticated food atmosphere and I really got real interested in the food angle.

If you started as an, actress slash caterer in the northeast, was that your first dealing with cooking or did you know about soul food before?

No. I grew up loving to cook. My mother had a cook, my grandmother had a cook, and growing up in the fifties in Mississippi, if you were form an upper middle class household, you were surrounded by wonderful African American women who were nurturing and fabulous cooks. And they didn’t cook from recipes; they cooked from their heart and their head. And as a little girl I loved to cook and would hang out in the kitchen with my family’s cooks and learn how to do things.

Did your mother do that?

No, my mother was a good cook, but she cooked more from what I call ‘white person church slash funeral food,’ [laughs a little]. Casseroles, congealed salads, that kind of stuff.

What was your relationship like with the women cooks in you home?

It was incredible, it was absolutely incredible. Not only did I feel like I had two mothers, I actually had more fear of disappointing our cook, whose name was Susie Williams, and I was more scared of Susie than I was of my own mama. Cause Susie wouldn’t let me out of the house in rollers, you know if mama wasn’t around. It was just an incredible relationship, a familial, paternalistic though, relationship between our families and our African American employees.

I am sure over the years of going from catering to sororities to here some of your own ways of cooking have changed a bit, but do you still like to stick with what you first learned in the kitchen?

Uhm, yeah I do in a lot of ways. But the styles of eating have from the thirty years ago when I was in a sorority and we were fed southern soul food, generally. I remember at my sorority at the University of Alabama, which was Tri Delta by the way, that we had a diet table. And if you decided to go on a diet you would sit at the diet table. The house mother would give you tuna fish and cottage cheese and canned peaches, and the rest of the house would be eating fried chicken and roast beef and mashed potatoes. And today’s fraternities and sororities, the appeal for your generation is along the lines of what you are familiar with. We did not have fast food restaurants when I was growing up. So we want to give more ethnic things- like Mexican food, tacos, a lot of Italian varieties of things in addition to the standard macaroni and cheese, fried okra.

Were you ever able to notice a difference between the sense of community between the girls from the sorority house and the guys from the fraternity house, and their relationships with the women who work the kitchens?

No, I think it is very similar. It is a very similar relationship. Even though a Greek house is not your home, there is a lot of effort to make it feel like your home. The health department says no one but the employees are allowed in the kitchen, but the members wander into the kitchen and for example, here at our house Mrs. Ethel, who is Mrs. Ethel Lockhart, is seventy six years old and makes breakfast to order. And the guys come into the kitchen and say, ‘Mrs. Ethel, can I have three scrambled with cheese and one pancake.’ And the sorority girls did the same thing. You sort of try to keep them out of there for safety purposes, but it is a home-type relationship.

You say that you try to make the house feel as much like home as possible, and I know that that is done largely through the food--

We do try to make it as comforting as we can, but again with the large membership we have, it is virtually impossible to develop relationships one-on-one, with that many members. I will tell you about Mrs. Ethel’s seventy fifth birthday party last year; do you want to hear about that?

----------

You mentioned the large numbers you have coming through; y’all have around two hundred don’t you?

Our highest point of membership this year first semester, right after rush, was two hundred and twenty five. Now we have about a hundred and seventy five, you know after second semester we lose some.

Could you tell just how the process works. You have two hundred boys out there and you have to figure out how much you need, what they want, you have to order it, get the trucks in. What all goes on?

Well, it is a little complicated. Most of the fraternity houses, the kitchens are not set up for maximum storage. So we are not able to buy when things are on sale. I buy everything from food distributors; I can’t do to Sam’s and shop for two hundred people. So it all comes off of an eighteen wheeler. I plan my menus around what my storage is going to accommodate, and I get five trucks a week. There are basically maybe fifteen to twenty and fifteen to twenty lunch items that I rotate about every four weeks. Some things like Chinese food, which comes in a kit, its frozen, I don’t give them but maybe once or twice a semester. So I plan things according to, you know, we’ll have beef one night, we’ll have chicken the next night, we’ll have another variation of chicken. It’s basically variations of beef and chicken with some seafood thrown in. But again, my stuff is limited on the knowledge of preparing seafood for two hundred, and it is difficult. We can do like a pasta with alfredo sauce and shrimp or something, but it is not cost effective. It is really cost prohibitive to do too much seafood beyond catfish or popcorn shrimp, you know, popcorn shrimp hogies or something. And then once I plan the menu, I go through my head and know I’ve got to get ‘five cases of this, we are going to eat ten cases of that,’ and I make my food orders accordingly. I make the orders generally according to what my freezer will sore.

You mentioned that with some of your frozen foods you have to start thawing it out two or three days before you cook it, right?

Yeah, again, that is a consideration. For example we do pot roast, and it is absolutely fantastic, it is better than we could cook it from scratch, but I go through ten cases of pot roast, they are huge. And it takes them three days to thaw. So I can get them in on a Thursday truck and serve them Monday night; they don’t have to go in a freezer, they go in my much larger walk in cooler. I have more space in the walk in.

I have been very surprised the see the numbers on prices of food that goes through here every week. Do you have any idea what an average supper might cost?

On the average, it depends on the type of thing I am giving them, like poppy-seed chicken with bow-tie pasta will not cost as much as pot roast. Spaghetti, which is basically made from ground beef, will not cost as much as lasagna, which we get already prepared. I probably spend between three fifty and four hundred dollars for the meat, or the main entrée, if it is a meat item, per meal. But with two hundred boys, by the time you add vegetables, salad, tea and all that, they are basically eating for about three fifty. Can’t go to MacDonald’s for less than five dollars. [laughs] And it is all you can eat.

Can you tell me a little about your kitchen staff.

I have two cooks. I have Mrs. Ethel Lockhart [see Ethel Lockart interview], and she is my head cook. She comes in at six thirty in the morning, does breakfast, lunch, and she leaves at three thirty. And usually by the time she leaves she has supper pretty much prepared and in the food warmer. I have a second cook who comes in at nine thirty. Her name is Mrs. Sandra Petties [see Sandra Petties interview], and she is pretty much Mrs. Ethel’s backup. Sandra is in charge of the salad bar and all the cold preparation and she also puts everything out at night, and she works until six thirty. The other three people I have on staff are men. They double as kitchen stewards to unpack and carry heavy stuff. And they also do the janitorial work in the house; clean the dorms, clean the dining room, and they rotate their hours also. My main guy in the morning comes in at six thirty. His name is Andrew Mitchell and he works till three thirty, he works through lunch. And Frank Tenor and Terence Petties [Sandra Petties’ son] come in later in the morning. See, by seven thirty those trucks have come and I’ve got a kitchen full of stuff, boxes that have to be put on the shelves and in the freezer and unboxed and accounted for. When the truck comes and I check in fifteen hundred dollars worth of food I have to check each item as it comes in off the truck, cause sometimes there are glitches and they did not send me the right item and I can on the spot return it. Or, they will be out of something which totally [messes up] the whole deal. But, if I check it in I know that I am paying for what I ordered and that I am getting what I am being charged for.

When I was talking to Mrs. Sandra and Mrs. Ethel I was asking how they all got along with each other and they said they all pretty much felt like a big family. Can you see that or feel in any way a part of it?

I do feel a part of it, although I am the supervisor and there is naturally going to be a boss/employee element running through there. My goal is to make everybody feel a family. As long as everybody maintains a professional work ethic, then I want us to be a family, and it has always been like that in any sorority or fraternity I have ever worked in. That is your goal, is for everybody to get along and for the work to get done no matter. Nobody says, ‘okay, that is not my job.’ We do what is presented to us, and by golly, I am in there washing dishes if I have to.

Can you tell me [more about Ethel Lockhart]?

I will tell you that Mrs. Ethel’s husband passed away recently, probably just before you started this project. And that was a devastating blow to her. He had been ill for a long, long time. He was a World War Two veteran. He had been at the VA in Memphis through the entire Christmas holidays and they insisted that she get him home, and she was just almost to the point of having to put him in a nursing home when he passed away. So she right now is not her usual self. Although she is very quiet, when Mrs. Ethel has something to say she will say it. She is just a little shy with strangers. She has an incredible family. Her grandson I have met on several occasions and is just a really, really neat guy. And she is an incredible lady. And you can imagine that at seventy six years old she is a product of the Depression and the Jim Crow era.

[H]ave you seen or learned [anything] from her?

I have leaned from Mrs. Ethel that you can make corn bread with mayonnaise in it. [laughs]. You did not know that either did you? Mrs. Ethel’s corn bread recipe, she uses mayonnaise, which you know is interesting because it is oil, its eggs and it just gives it a real interesting consistency….But, when I first took this job and I walked in and was faced with the previous house mother not being well, and so she had not really kept up with how the kitchen was arranged. And there was stuff in every nook and cranny of the freezer. And I kept finding these little packages of biscuits, frozen biscuit dough, everywhere, wrapped up in aluminum foil. And I said ‘Mrs. Ethel, what is this?’ She said, ‘Oh, I make biscuits from scratch.’ And I said, ‘You did, you won’t ever have to pick up a rolling pin again. I have more things for you to do than make biscuits form scratch.’ Cause we can buy biscuits that are perfectly fine. And she hugged my neck. So, I don’t know if that answers you question, but we were tired of the rolling pin. And she said, ‘Well, don’t throw it away cause we will need it to crush up Ritz crackers and things for casserole topping.’ And I said, ‘Well, we won’t throw it away, but we should retire it.’ I learned [that] Mrs. Ethel knew how to cook everything, she was doing it all from scratch. And that is an amazing feat. But when you have to feed two hundred boys it just does not work for my style of management. I did not want her to work that hard…I don’t know what I would do without Mrs. Ethel, and I can’t even think about it. Because she does the work of three people. And she had a general idea of what the boys liked. Of course I was coming from a sorority house; I knew boys were meat and potatoes. But she knew the specifics of the types of things they liked and she is used to that kitchen, it is very, very small. We have one oven. And I did purchase some food warmers which helped us enormously. But, Mrs. Ethel has her own way of where she wants things placed and where her utensils are. So she tells anybody that is new where things are and how we operate.

----------

Do you think you will stay here a while, do you enjoy it?

Yeah, I really love it. I mean, I love the food business, but I was frustrated with the pressure of a constant turnover of customers and the public and with catering you never know when the next job is coming. And basically I like to produce, I am a producer. That is basically what it boils down to. If I am producing a party for a catering company, or I am producing three meals a day for a fraternity of two hundred. I am a producer and I like the elements of organization, and I love the guys. They are a lot of fun. And I hope that I am able to physically continue to do this work because it is really enjoyable, and a house director’s job is ninety percent food and ten percent ‘call the plumber, call the locksmith, call the electrician.’ I feel like a live in caterer and it is a lot of fun. And as long as the boys are full, no one is going to be hungry; we can come up with something around here.

From what I have seen, the boys all seem to be pretty happy with the way things go…Do you think that is the case?

I hope so. I think there is always room for improvement and I hope that when we get a kitchen renovation and we triple the size of our kitchen, I know I will be able to provide a more varied menu. Right now we simply do not have the equipment, we don’t have the preparation room, we don’t have the facilities to do the types of things. Like I want to have a built in grill. Because I know the guys love like grilled pork chops, marinated grilled chicken, but our grill is outside, and the weather in wintertime and all of that, bird droppings, and all of that is a factor. But I hope they are happy. And they eat a lot. Gosh, it’s a housemother’s nightmare that everybody who signed up to eat actually comes and eats. Its sort of a takes care of your food budget.

To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.