Tabling All the Age-Old Questions
Let’s talk stereotypes.
Chances are that if you walk into a restaurant, any restaurant, you’ll be greeted by a woman. Her job is to seat you or be so pleasant that you just smile when she tells you the wait will be 25 minutes. Affirmative action never got much of a toehold in the hostess bastion: Jobholders are disproportionately represented by good-looking women in their 20s.
With that intro, we bring you Ruth Gold, who puts in a four-day, 25-hour-a-week shift as hostess at the Bluewater Grill in Newport Beach. Next March, Gold will be 80.
With a different personality, she might get upset by the standard refrain from customers about how she got her job: They figure she either owns the place or is the owner’s mother.
Neither of which bothers Ruth, who simply won’t get drawn into long philosophical treatises about age, because, frankly, she doesn’t think about it that much. She’s not a crusader, or a curiosity, or a charity case. Just a gal trying to make a living, albeit a gal born in 1918.
“I don’t seem to have any older rapport with older people,” she says, sitting outside the restaurant that nestles against the Rhine Channel leading into Newport Bay. “I have no social involvement with them. My daughter and I go out to lunch, and we go with her friends.”
She doesn’t say it with a smidgen of haughtiness. It just happens to be a fact, she says, that her contacts tend to be with younger people. When she takes her daily 55-minute walk, she has Barbra Streisand on her headphones. When she shops, it’s at the Gap. She takes vitamin pills but no other medication. When she was in her 60s, she went back to work for a department store for which she had previously worked and was assigned to, naturally, the children’s department.
Like I said, she’s not into heavy contemplation of herself as a stereotype-buster. She got the job in a fairly simple manner: Her daughter worked at the restaurant, the owners got to know and like Ruth and asked if she’d consider a hostess job. The restaurant has a significant older clientele, and the owners thought--ironically, as it turns out--that Ruth would click with seniors.
I asked one of the owners, Richard Staunton, about defying tradition in hiring a septuagenarian hostess. He acknowledged the average hostessing age around Orange County is probably early 20s, if that.
“It’s always nice to have somebody who’s attractive and intelligent greeting guests as they come in,” Staunton said. “Primarily, intelligent. They’re the first person the guests meet. They create that first impression. If you have someone who knows what they’re doing and is well-trained and likable, that makes all the difference. Looks aren’t the No. 1 thing; it’s personality. If you have a bimbo at the front door, it doesn’t help at all.”
At the risk of being sexist, let us hasten to add that Ruth is no eyesore. Her main calling card, though, is that same dynamism that led her, at 71, to leave 53 years of life in Miami behind her in 1989 and move to Orange County. Her husband had died on the fifth green on a golf course when Ruth was 58, and she had spent the next 13 years readjusting to single life.
Then an idea struck.
She and her son, with whom she’d been living in Miami, “packed up 53 years of accumulation and sold off a lot of stuff,” she says. “We left Dec. 19 of 1989.” Within about a month, at 71, Ruth had a job in California.
Walking around the Lido Isle area, she saw a “Help Wanted” sign at the Edwards Lido theater. The next thing she knew, she was working the box office, a job she quit this year after seven years. Her idea of slowing down was to take the hostess job, which she’s had for about four months.
I tried to ask all the cliched questions about aging and America’s fixation on youth, but Ruth is so unimpressed with being a working woman at 79 that the questions fell flat.
“I don’t feel out of place at all,” she says. “From the first day, it just felt natural to me. The boys here--the owners--they just show me so much respect. They encouraged me because they know I enjoy what I’m doing. It’s not a chore for me to come to work.”
Trying one more time to extract the obligatory nuggets about aging in America, I ask her again at the end of our conversation if she thinks about getting old or about the fact that she is old. “I really don’t,” she says.
Wouldn’t it be more fun, I ask, to hang out with people nearer your age, if only to talk about shared experiences?
She pauses for a moment before answering. “I never thought about that,” she says.
Maybe that’s the nugget I was looking for: The best way to approach old age is not think about it that much.
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.