Hot potato, hot potato…

October 22. 2024

By Bob Zettler

From Wikipedia, “Hot potato is a party game that involves players gathering in a circle and tossing a small object such as a beanbag or even a real potato to each other while music plays.[1] The player who is holding the object when the music stops is eliminated.” There is even a song that we learned as children that goes something  like this:

Hot potato, hot potato

Hot potato, hot potato

Hot potato, hot potato

Potato

STOP!

Well, sometimes one just cant stop…

Many, many years ago, probably in the Fall of 1969, I got a job at the first Ponderosa Steak House to open in the area. They had leveled the Adairs Dairy just south of the Hessel Boulevard on Neil Street to build this new restaurant. 

Loved Adairs! When I was very young in the 1950s and into the early 1960’s, Adairs delivered bottled milk right to your front porch using a horse drawn wagon and depositing the returnable glass bottles of excellent milk into a metal, insulated box. I can still hear the “clop, clop, clop” of the horses hoves as they came up Hessel. Actually it was “clop, clop, clop, cloo” as they were four-legfed creatures, not three…but if digress as usual…

As I said, I got a job with Ponderosa when I was 16 and was hired with a number of fellow high school mates my age, and we opened that restaurant in either the Summer or early Fall that year.  And, in another recent story of mine I discussed how I volunteered that I had a good memory when asked by their management (I didn’t and still don’t - and I have a lot of friends who will attest to that), and became their first order taker! I received a whole ten cents an hour extra and hour for that responsibility.

Anyway, I believe it was a Saturday and there had been a home football game, so the restaurant had been crowded, even more so than usual.  And around 7pm I saw we were running very low on baked potatoes, so I informed the manager that night, Al Gobbles (sp?), who rushed out and filled one of the potatoe cookers with almost a 100 aluminum covered potatoes. Now the potatoes took nearly an hour to cook, and that, IMHO, was way too many potatoes and I said so, but diplomatically of course.

That didn’t sit well with Al, that a 16 year old was trying to tell an experienced 40-50+ year old man how to do his business. No big deal…right?

And time proved me right for that entire drawer of aluminum covered (now fully) baked potatoes had to be thrown out that evening as business petered out shortly after Al had filled the drawer…

As it was a Saturday night and a number of us had plans (right Randy?),  I helped the cleanup  crew take care of things so we could have a couple of hours of fun after we closed.

Towards the end, I went ahead and grabbed that tray/basket of 100 aluminum wrapped baked potatoes, and was carrying it outside to empty it in the dipsy-dumpster, when it happened!

One of those aluminum wrapped baked potatoes fell out of the tray and hit the new asphalt parking lot on this very, very cool Fall evening.  

POOF it went AND as it hit, the hot potatoe burst through the aluminum wrap, all flakey and steamy, and it looked like someone had tossed a gas grenade. 

COOOL!!!! WAY COOOOL!!!!

I wasn’t the only witness to this miracle and the rest of the crew came over as I grabbed one and threw it high into the air. And when it landed, POOOOOOF times 10!

Pretty soon everyone wanted to try this, and before too long, we had nearly emptied all those hot, aluminum wrapped baked potatoes.  Man, that was cool we all agreed and shortly thereafter , the, doors were locked and everyone headed out to have some real FUN!

Now, again, this was 55 years ago  but the basics of the night seem clear and memorable – for ALL involved…

As the next day was a Sunday, I slept in but went into work sometime that day.  And that’s when it hit the fan AGAIN but for me now.  What do I mean? Well something none of us discussed the night before and that was how would the parking lot look in the morning?

It looked something like the craters on the Moon I’m told, with bits of dried, hard, sticky potatoe remnants mixed in with hundreds of shreds of aluminum foil mixed in. And one of the bosses had arrived early that morning to discover this homemade diorama decorating his parking lot and knew his employees were most likely to blame…and he was correct-a-mundo!

From what I heard, the poor guy almost had a second heart attack and then began calling the crew at home who had worked the night before.

They were instructed to get their butts down there ASAP, where they were handed buckets of soapy water and a scrub brush and told in no uncertain terms they were to get every last remnant gone and then report to him when they were done.

Unfortunately, they didn’t get a hold of me, so I was spared this suicide mission. Suicide mission? Yep, for many of my friends (at the time) were then fired.

God, did I feel like an ___hole! I guess they kept me on, as after all, I was their number one order taker!

However, and this was now either 1969 or 1970, and hairstyles for males forced the Health Department to demand guys wear a hairnet when their hair was a certain length, so random hairs were kept off the food. And since mine wasn’t a military cut but had some length to it, a few weeks later. I was told to get a haircut…

Retaliation? Probably. But I got the haircut and when I came back into work a few days later I was immediately told to go home and not come back for two weeks…As it looked like it hadn’t been cut – BS!

Well. I cleaned out my locker and never went back.  And even though I still love my aluminum wrapped baked potatoes, with lots of butter and sometimes sour cream. I have never once thrown another into the air where it would land on someone’s new asphalt parking lot!

Would you believe I haven’t done it twice since then…

EPILOUGE

I just now shared this draft with my blood-brother Randy Holdren, who was there that Saturday night, as a participant AND one of several they had come in to clean what he so aptly described, “it looked like a war zone!” and obtained his review and seal of approval.

We are more that friends still, and I still feel some guilt for the episode, BUT there was no malice intended. It was just a stupid act of some teenagers led by yours truly.  And I am sorry that some people got fired before me, but, you have to admit if you could have experienced what we did that crisp, cool evening after work, that you too would most likely believe it was “Damn Cooooool too!!”