Listen to the interview with Bruce and Aaron Henkin from WYPR.

Name: Bruce Martin
Job title: retired Regional Cafeteria Manager
Photograph location: photographed at Great Kids Farm
Years of service: 26
Preparing food and cooking, it was the easy part. But once I got into the management side of it, we had to deal with money. You had to deal with the books. You had to deal with inventory… that was a learning curve, especially the money part, because you had to keep everything down to a dime. – Bruce Martin

Bruce Martin_Great Kids Farm_08-20-21
Transcript of Bruce Martin’s interview with Aaron Henkin by Rev.com

Bruce Martin:
My name is Bruce Martin. I’m a retired Baltimore City Schools regional cafeteria manager started in 1994. I worked as a food service worker, and I worked my way up to management over the years. Most of the schools that I’ve worked at are in the Northwest Baltimore, and also those were the schools that I was a regional manager over of during the course of the last six years. And I recently retired this year, back in the spring.
Speaker 2:
Sounded great. [inaudible 00:00:33] good start.
Bruce Martin:
Good.
Speaker 2:
Tell me what’s your favorite memory. At your retirement, when you look back on your career, what made you most proud?
Bruce Martin:
My favorite memory was started back in 2001 when we started, what was called the School Nutrition and Accountability Program. At that time, it was decided that all Baltimore City School cafeterias would go on the computer, meaning everything will be computerized as far as your paperwork and your ordering. Where at that time, computers were still new. And we had a lot of cafeteria managers, matter of fact, 90% of them that did not know how to operate a computer. They didn’t know what a mouse was. So it took us many years, a team of us, about maybe, 10, we started out with… We had to go to the schools, back then 200 schools, and it took us years because you had to spend at least a week at a school in pairs, a team of twos, when it all winded down, it was left with Jess, Regina Jones and myself.
Bruce Martin:
Then they made us school nutrition accountability, something I forgot the entire that we had. And then we continued to support from the office. Regina was mostly in the office field and phone calls. And I was mostly in the field doing computer repair work, a cash register repair work, because I was a little more technical, but she was a woman with the numbers. And that was my favorite memory. I think I spent, maybe, 13-14 years in that department, and that was one of the most rewarding jobs that I had.
Speaker 2:
Rewind to the beginning of your career, 1991 you say, how’d you find your way… Before 1994, how’d you find your way into a school cafeteria and at the beginning of this path.
Bruce Martin:
Okay. How I got started for me being in the Food and Nutrition Department in 1994. I fought myself between jobs, and I was looking through the newspapers and I was seen advertise school cafeteria workers. And I say, well, I could do that for a little while, just to get started, get some cash in my pocket. And so I applied, I got interviewed, I was accepted and I started at my first school, Rowland Heights in August 1994. Well, when I got in, I was a part-time worker at the bottom of the barrel, but that was fine. It was something to do. And so I had a manager [Dorifa Blick 00:03:08] and after few months watching her and the other staff doing what they were doing, I asked Ms. Blick, because she teach me how to be a manager. And certainly she showed that, she taught me everything from a to Z.
Bruce Martin:
I learnt it. And I think in my second year as a food service worker, I was offered a school to see how I do. And that was down in West Port Elementary School, I believe it was. And I worked there for a half a school year as a manager. It was a pre-play school, meaning the food was already packaged from another company. And all we had to do was slide in the oven, heat it up. That was kind of boring, but I took it. And after six months, then my regional manager at the time, Ms. Lewis Sessoms. She advanced me to another school that where we cooked full cooking, like we used to do back in the day.
Bruce Martin:
And I continued to be a manager, and I worked my way up. And like I said, by 2001, the position was offered to me to work at [inaudible 00:04:11] in the SNAP project because I had some computer history already. I already knew windows 95, which was a program back then. And so that was how I came up through the ranks. But working as a food cafeteria manager was another excellent position that I really enjoyed. You get to learn a lot of things about food and food safety, how to deal with employees and the management side of it.
Speaker 2:
I wonder if you could talk about that learning curve, that first couple of years where that opened your eyes to just how much was involved with doing your job well. Talk about the different things you had to learn. The things that surprised you along the way.
Bruce Martin:
Yeah. Preparing food and cooking it was the easy part. But once I really got into the management part side of it now, and we had to deal with money. You had to deal with the books. You had to deal with inventory. You had to deal with the people who sent us our food that we ordered from, that was a learning curve, especially the money part, because you had to keep everything down to a dime. Matter of fact, I remember they had a guy who used to go around randomly and come in and check the money in your safe versus what you had on paper. And if it didn’t match, he would write it down and send it to your regional. I remember one time I was 10 cents short and he sent a write to my regional. A couple of days later, I found that dime.
Bruce Martin:
It fell out the bag, and it was stuck in the corner of the safe, but it took me the first two years to get a hang of being a manager. Those two years, I had a good regional manager who was patient. She taught me a lot of things. I had other managers as well that assisted me along the way. So once you get into a group, knowing what to do from the time you come in the morning, the time you leave, it’s the same thing every day. You just got to just do it.
Speaker 2:
Talk to me a little bit about your… When you started the job, you say you needed a job, you needed some money. I imagine at some point, it became clear to you the importance of this work and the purpose of that work. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your awakening to realizing just how important, what you were doing was for the students who depended on it.
Bruce Martin:
Yeah. Me coming to discover how important the job was, came early. When you will see the kids come in the morning, call you by your name, thanking you for the food that you serve them. And then you learn their names. I mean, there were managers who learnt 400 kids’ names, those kids became your kids. When the parents drop the kids off in the morning, I used to always say, they are now our kids. They are our kids to take care of throughout the day, feed them, make sure they got a good meal in their body. And you really saw the appreciation from the students. Most of them anyway, who really enjoyed the food because back then, when I first started, we still had the cookies and the pies and cakes, the sodas and stuff, and of course, we had our regular lunches.
Bruce Martin:
And so we saw the kids on a daily basis. They would help us wash the tables. And you really have relationships with a lot of the kids, as you see them coming from kindergarten. And then you say goodbye to them when you leave for the sixth grade. And I think that was when I said, when I knew how important working in a school cafeteria was.
Speaker 2:
Talk to me about just how much… I’ll give you a second to think about this while the plane goes over, but I’ll ask… I’d like you to talk about just how much of the work that you do is about science and about nutrition and just the kind of thought that goes into what you’re presenting to those kids. And I imagine there’re things that they like, and then there’re things that you hope they like.
Speaker 4:
Hold on one second.
Bruce Martin:
Okay. So as far as our food is concerned in science, as you see, we had the great kids farm. This is where the kids especially get to see on how to seed, how it goes from a seed to something on their plate. And in my job, I get to see how difficult it is to make a menu that is nutritious to the kids. We had to look out for the salt content. There’s a certain amount of salt that we can have. There’s a certain amount of fat that we can only have enough food, and salt and fat is flavor, but because of USDA regulations, we have to limit our salt to a certain amount, as well as our fat. Here in Baltimore City Schools, all our meats are whole muscle meat, which is the best meat that you can get, and we put a lot of effort into making sure our kids get a good meal, better than McDonald’s.
Bruce Martin:
I would rather eat one of our meals, and I’m not just saying this to beef it up, but I would rather eat a school lunch than eat a McDonald’s lunch. It was more nutritious for me. It’s going to keep me healthier. There’s a lot of thought went into the processing of it and getting it to the plate. And science plays a real important part in getting that food to the plate for the kids and keeping them safe on food hazardous, such as diseases, bacterias that we really had to work on day by, day by day. We had the health department visit our schools every day. And food has to be at a proper temperature. It has to be held at the proper temperature. It has to be stored at the proper temperature. So, that’s very important to keep our kids safe. I understand the kids like McDonald’s and [inaudible 00:10:28]. I do it every now and then, but still we had to be nutritious. And sometimes we get a lot of slack because some people want different things on the menu, but it just doesn’t fit.
Speaker 2:
There are a couple of questions on this list I want to make sure I ask you. One second. All right. How long ago did you retire?
Bruce Martin:
I retired on March 31st, 2021.
Speaker 2:
So you’re last year, on the job was in the middle of a global pandemic. Talk about how that changed work-life for you.
Bruce Martin:
Oh yeah. The pandemic started for us March 16th, 2020. Everything got turned upside down. The way we used to do things we could no longer do. The kids could no longer come into the cafeteria line, per se, and get their meals. We had to be innovative in how to get the meals to the kids, had to package them in such a way that we limited the contact between us and anybody. The staffing we had to change. We couldn’t no longer put 10 people in the cafeteria, like you might have a school that served average 1500 meals. So you’ll have about 10 employees that could no longer be the case. We had to rotate employees on a schedule so that some could work during a certain period of time and then they take off and the others come in and replace them. So our whole way of doing things changed. We no longer had health department visits from the health department.
Bruce Martin:
So we had to self-regulate ourselves to make sure we’ve been doing things properly. We could no longer have face-to-face meetings. Everything went to Zoom… On Zoom and the other program that we used. So, that was very challenging. And then we got to a point where we worked from home, those of us in higher management, we couldn’t no longer go into the office and do our day to day things that we would normally do. So we had to do it from home. So we had to make sure we had a good internet and printer and a nice computer with a good camera. [I had telephone 00:13:01] way to take phone calls. You had to talk to your people out in the field by means a telephone or use a FaceTime to see what they could show you what they was doing. So that was really, really a challenge. And that’s the challenge that we all came.
Speaker 2:
Talk about, was there an increased need for food during the pandemic?
Bruce Martin:
Our food… Let me… Like I say it, that the number of meals we serve per a day did decrease because we no longer had thousand kids in the school. It might’ve dropped down to 300, but what we did find, we were still able to feed those kids who were not in school by means of serving them from the outside. They would walk up to our entrance at the school and the cafeteria worker would give them two days’ worth of food. They would get two breakfasts, two lunches, and two suppers, enough to hold that kid for two days. And then after two days, they come back again, and we again give them enough meals for two days. So in that sense, that was new for us. And it worked. We had a lot of people from the outside coming in, needing food for them, yeah.
Speaker 2:
I wonder if you can think back on your career, maybe it was in earlier years of your career, when you were on the front lines, feeding, interacting with students, but is there… And obviously you don’t need to use a name, but is there a student that you developed a bond with, that you remember, or that sticks with you when you think about the impact that you had on kids, there’s a story of a kid who sticks with you.
Bruce Martin:
Yeah. There was a little girl that came to my school, and I knew her parents. I knew both her mother and father. And she came in when she was in the kindergarten and over the years, I watched her. I mean, she did something wrong. I helped discipline her, told her mother, told her father, but she would always come into cafeteria, see me, and I’d always speak to her. As the years went on, she got a little older. Then she graduated from high school. She became a cafeteria worker, and she worked under me in the school system. And that was really a joy to see her coming from a little baby girl, up to a grown woman. And she chose to work in the school cafeteria.
Speaker 2:
What do you want people to understand about the work you all do as food and nutrition workers? What are some misconceptions that you think people have about your department, your staff, what you guys do?
Bruce Martin:
One misconception people have about us is that our food is what they call welfare food. Back in the day, that was a term that was given to food that came from the USDA and was given to needy families. As matter of fact, my mother received this food herself. We got a block of cheese, we got some flowers and powder milk and some other items. And so that label became welfare food. Well in the school system, our food does come from the USDA, but it’s not that welfare food, as people would think of it. It is very high quality food. I would give that food to, if I had kids any day. I eat it myself, and I want parents to know, no it’s not McDonald’s, it’s not LongHorn Steakhouse. It is good, nutritious food that will keep your child alive and healthy for the many years that they would be in the Baltimore City School System.
Bruce Martin:
And it’s so much cheaper than a parent trying to put that together, say they have four or five kids. You see, we take a lot of weight off here in Baltimore City School. During the week, all parents had to do is maybe provide a nighttime snack because we gave them breakfast, lunch, and supper, and a snack, free. You can [beat 00:00:17:08] five days a week. All your parents got to do now is worry about Saturday and Sunday. And in some cases they’re able to get on Fridays. I don’t know how they’re going to do it this school year, but they’ll be able to get enough food on Friday to last them through the weekend. So it can be…
Speaker 2:
It’s interesting. When I was interviewing Ms. Flowers yesterday, she said her biggest worry was always Friday when the kids would go home, how are they going to eat over the weekend? I think we’re in good shape here. You did a great job. Let me just make sure… Okay. Two more questions, and I’ll let you go. What do you think was the hardest part of the job, that part of the job that gave you the biggest headache? And what do you think was the most rewarding part of the job, the part that made it worthwhile?
Bruce Martin:
Okay. The tougher job was when I became a regional cafeteria manager, maybe about six years ago. The hardest part was learning how to delegate to other managers because I will have about 15 managers and 60 or so employees. And the hardest part was delegating to them and had them do it the way I needed it to be done. So a lot of time they called for discipline. And so you had to discipline an employee progressively to get down from where they are, to where you want them. And a lot of times… No, not a lot of times… Sometimes, the employee just wasn’t moldable, I’ll put it that way. And then the hardest part was, had to say goodbye to them, knowing that they could have had a great future here in Food and Nutrition Department. So that was the hardest thing for me, but there was something that had to be done. Otherwise you’ll have 60 employees knowing what they want to do.
Bruce Martin:
And of course, in any business, that’s not going to work, but for the most part, the employees, they learn well and quick, and they do what they’re told to do for the most part. But every now and then you get some that they just don’t match.
Speaker 2:
What was your favorite part of the job?
Bruce Martin:
My favorite part of the job was, okay. That was when I became a regional, and then I was able to pretty much supervise myself during the course of the day. Of course, I would have a list of things to do from a manager, but I was able to do it in my own time. And that made things a lot easy. Being able to travel to 15 schools on an average, maybe three or four a day, and felt like being my own boss, supervising myself even though I had people to answer to by means of paperwork, but that was a fun part for me.
Speaker 2:
Last question for you, 1994 to 2020, 16-17 years in this career, how do you think this career changed you as a person over the past couple of decades? Think about who you were when you started and who you were when you retired. And I wonder just what kind of change has had for you personally.
Bruce Martin:
Okay. Well, actually it’s been 26 years.
Speaker 2:
Oh, I miscalculated… Yeah, right. 90 plus 20. Okay. 26 years. Yeah. That’s a long time.
Bruce Martin:
Yeah. So over the 26 years, I learnt a lot about the food industry. I learnt now, when I go into a restaurant, what helped me now, not to look down on them, as just a cafeteria worker or something like that. That is a profession. And that helps me to respect those people, particularly, when I go into a restaurant, I give them a proper tip. I thank them for whatever they do, even when they mess up my meal, I thank them. I know how to send it back properly and not [prorate 00:21:01] Anybody. So it has made me respect people a whole lot because when you have 60 employees yourself, you’ve got 60 different individuals with 60 different outlooks on life, many different cultures. And so you get to learn people for what they are and not their race or their religion. Everybody has something unique to them. And so I learned to treat people as individuals and not put them in a class of people. So, that was one of the things over the 26 years that I learned to do.
Speaker 2:
Anything else you want to add that I neglected to ask you about?
Bruce Martin:
How do I like being retired?
Speaker 2:
How do you like being? Yeah. So you’ve been retired for just a couple of months now. How’s that treating you?
Bruce Martin:
Well for few months now I’ve been retired and I love this. I mean, this is the best life. I get up. When I get ready, I get to go fishing. I get to go out on my motorcycle. I get to go out and eat without cooking. I have a free life. I can do what I want to do when I want to do it. I don’t have to worry on Sundays about what’s going to happen on Monday. I don’t have to worry about who’s going to call out. And I had to replace an employee. I don’t have to worry about food orders or none of that. All I need to do is enjoy my life. And I have less stress because Food and Nutrition job is a stressful job, working in any restaurant situation is. So now I no longer have that stress, and life is just so nice and easy.