John “Mac” McCaffrey (1953-1957)
Working at CSDR from 1953 to 1957, Chief John "Mac" McCaffrey was popular with students and
staff. Mac walked among the sitting students and encouraged them to "eat green vegetables, good for you, for a strong body." Amazingly, he won more Meritous Awards than any other state employee in the 70,000 state government workforce.
The brand-new kitchen and dining room were opened for limited use in February 1953 with the first 56 Lower School students enrolled. Mac’s official title was the supervising cook or simply called a chef. There were only two cooks and four food service assistants in the first semester with the small student body. It was a good warm-up start for the full-fledged year in the following fall.
Lower School students sat in the designated section. Margaret Holcomb, ‘63, saw each table with a middle school boy or girl sitting with five elementary diners. That way the older diner kept an eye on his tablemates for table manners. She added that elementary diners stood and stated a meal prayer three times every day. High school diners stated the prayer only at dinner.
See the Disney characters on the wall. They were still there when I was a senior in 1976. Eighteen years later in 1994, I returned as a first-year teacher, the Disney characters were not there anymore.
In September 1953 with a full school year, CSDR officially opened with 225 students across all grades. Ninety-three percent of the students lived in the dorm. The 93% residential student record remains in the book ever since. The kitchen staff was expanded to fifteen kitchen staff in proportion to the enlarged student body.
In 1954, Institutions commercial magazine accorded the new school kitchen with the prestigious honor of being named one of the most outstanding institutional kitchens in the United States. The beautiful plaque hung in the dining room for years. Its whereabouts are a mystery now. In February 1955, meals served in the dining hall cost 25 cents each.
There was a room dedicated to meat butchering inside the kitchen. Cold animal carcasses were transported to school by truck. The truck parked with the cargo facing the receiving end behind the kitchen. The super heavy carcasses were then hooked to the ceiling for easy transfer from the truck to the butcher shop inside the building. In the school museum, we have the metal hook with a ceiling alloy wheel found in the kitchen decades ago.
The butcher used special tools to butcher different parts of the carcass for cooking and storing the remainder for later. The butcher shop was kept cold to keep the meat from spoilage.
It is not known when butchering on the premises came to an end. Today the kitchen staff receive meat pieces in smaller sizes from off campus.
Margaret Holcomb, ‘63, remembers many things about her first semester with 55 other pioneer Lower School boys and girls in Spring 1953. One is the cake to be served at lunch on Friday to any student who licked clean his plate at every meal from Monday morning through Friday morning. Mac had the honor to serve the cake to deserving young diners at lunch.
Holcomb further adds that at first students lined up to get a tray to pick up silverware, moved the tray onto stainless steel shelf to accept a plate with food and a salad bowl.
In the mid-1950s, the service style changed in favor of the restaurant style in which students waited at the table for the staff to bring meals to them.
In November 1957, Mac was stricken with leukemia, an incurable illness, and passed away on February 3, 1958. Older alumni and staff missed Mac for his friendliness and hard work. He won an astounding eleven state awards in four short years for his leadership.
Above was the seat arrangement for each rectangle table with six wooden chairs with cushion seat each. Each table had salt and pepper shakers. Diners had glasses full of whole milk filled before they arrived, a plastic basket of bread slices with pats of butter provided. We have several tables, chairs and table wares in the museum. Now for the human side, four people in the picture taken in 1959 are identified as Mark McCrory, ‘62, Marilyn Lewis, ‘61, Carole Lee Wales Barnes, E-‘60 and Peggy Hunt.
Willard Allen (1957-1985)
Willard Allen started his employment at CSDR as a cook in the school kitchen in 1953. He had a wonderful boss, John “Mac” McCaffrey, for the first four years until he died. Allen filled Mac’s big shoes and led the food service for the next 28 years until his retirement in 1985.
In the early years, the whole kitchen staff met every year for a group picture for the yearbook. You can see that Allen stands out among the essentially white staff. He happened to be the boss.
Like Mac, Allen had a ready smile every day. At the break, staff went to the staff dining room in the back and enjoyed the coffee.
Visitors from other state institutions with kitchen facilities were sent to CSDR to study the efficient operational system in the kitchen.
By design, the student population expanded by 100 students every year from 1953 to 1958, and the kitchen staff grew in size to handle all the required kitchen work. At its peak, the kitchen staff consisted of one chef, four cooks, 22 food service assistants and one janitor.
With thanks to Upper students in the bakery classes, all baked goods such as bread, rolls, cookies, bear claw pastries, doughnuts, pies and cakes were prepared from scratch and baked in the bakery shop located between the dining room and the infirmary. The aroma spread throughout the dining room and outside in the area five days a week from 7:00 am to 2:00 pm from 1953 to 1973. The bakery shop unfortunately closed with the retirement of the first and only bakery teacher, Rudolph Ackerman. The reason for the permanent closure of the bakery shop in 1973 is unknown. In addition to the fresh baked goods, there was a room dedicated to making old-fashioned ice cream.
Allen invited the Lower School classes to tour his kitchen and see the turkeys in the large oven for Thanksgiving.
In 1980, the dress code for kitchen assistants became relaxed, thereby allowing them to stop wearing white uniforms. They started wearing the casual attire. Only the cooks continued to wear white uniforms.
Bill Ramborger, ‘62, reflects on his interactions with Allen every year during the MLB baseball season. They both were hard-core LA Dodgers fans. Allen kept close tabs on the Dodgers news from his radio and shared the updates with sports-minded Bill. Allen was able to fingerspell and sign a little.
Leh Ota (1985-2015)
After 28 years at the helm, Willard Allen passed the relay baton to Leh Ota as the next head of the food service department. A hard worker by nature, Ota aimed to provide the best possible dining experience for students and staff. She made an effort to learn ASL to mingle with deaf kitchen staff and students. Of the four department heads thus far, Ota was the best signer. I remember being able to converse with her in ASL about finding any vintage wares and utensils in her department for the museum in the 1990s.
Above is the campus museum. Notice the old rectangle table with old chairs from the dining room. On the table are the old wares.
Ota continued the tradition from her predecessors of serving Thanksgiving meals with a home touch to the students and school staff. During my seven years teaching at CSDR, I made it a point to enjoy the feast on campus. Below is Ota on the right dishing out mashed potato.
The silver wares and fragile glasses were replaced with brown plastic wares and unbreakable glasses. A sad change of time.
During the Ota era, drinking machines were planted to let diners help themselves with water, juice, milk and chocolate milk.
Ota practiced DEI (diversity, equity and inclusivity) for hiring new employees to work within her department. She hired three deaf employees including two alumni to join with the sole deaf employee. They represented the largest deaf food service workers in the school’s history. The four deaf food service workers mentioned were Bonnie Fontana, Peggy Dominick Almendarez, ’61, Tim Price, ‘81 and Mary Stigall in 2006. As of 2025, Stigall is the only deaf food service employee still at work with her plan to retire in 2026 or so. It is hopeful we will soon see a few more new deaf faces in the food service department.
In 1990, the cooks were allowed to wear casual attire just like the kitchen assistants with a break in their dress code ten years earlier. I think the reason for a change in the dress code was most, if not all, meals were prepared at the Chino State Prison with outstanding kitchen facilities. The prisoners cook the meals there. The meals were then transported 25 miles east to the CSDR kitchen for warm-up. In the earlier years, the cooks in white uniforms cooked meals from scratch on the premises.
Diane Tran (2015-present)
With the recent enlargement and renovation of the kitchen and dining room around 2010, the staff dining room was removed as only a few staff had come to dine in the school cafeteria in recent years. When I was a teacher at CSDR from 1994 to 2001, I ate two times each day I worked for lunch and dinner. The meal ticket was merely $2.50. The food was fabulous. Just like home cooked. Spaghetti was the best. Everyday at lunch, I ate with Erpel Garrett, the school audiologist with 38 years of service from 1962 to 2000. He screened my hearing twice in 1970 and 1976 and confirmed that I was profoundly deaf. As a long-time diner in the school dining room, he loved the food they served, too. Garrett shared with me many stories from the past four decades he saw and heard. Garrett, now at 90, is in a living-assisted home in nearby Moreno Valley.
The facade of the dining hall looks great. Below, the entrance doors are located on the right. The stacks of red trays and brown plastic spoons and forks are stocked up. Upon arrival, diners pick up a tray and plastic implements and then head to the serving shelf where kitchen workers dish out food portions.
Below shows the gray floor with a red cub paw print. Unlike in the past with dining tables taking up the entire floor space, far fewer round tables are scattered through with plenty of elbow room. There are schedule blocks for grade-specific groups for each meal. The big reason for the few tables compared to the past is that only 25% of today’s students reside in cottages/dorms. In the past, the residents made up 75% of the 500-student body.
Kevin Struxness, ‘76, MA
Editor, CSDR Old Times
10 February 2025
Comentarios