Lyle was too cheap to pay a decent wage, so his waiter/busboys were jr. high kids, his chefs were high school kids, his manager a college kid from UNO. We used to go there after school, play the juke box, order only fries and a coke (so not to spoil our dinners) — and then, according to Lyle, use so much catsup on the fries that there was no profit for him.

Lyle’s greater problem, though, was his employees… He wasn’t there most of the day, and the college kid was too busy stealing from the register to bother with much management. His most-often complaint was of “scarfing”, which we thought was a word he had made up, but turns out to mean stealing food and eating it as fast as possible [ala John Belushi sucking down a square of green jello in 'Animal House']. My peak recollection was the day the beer truck accidentally dropped off one too many kegs… Lyle had expanded the restaurant into an adjacent storage space and had put in a bar., called, naturally, The Hole In The Wall. It was mostly for his Wednesday night crowd of square-dancers, who would show up from their dancin’ in full square regalia, hungry and thirsty. Anyway, one day an extra keg was left, unaccounted for… The chefs quickly realized the error and hooked up the keg, planning on getting drunk and then unhooking it before Lyle appeared. What they did not know, at that point, was that one cannot unhook a keg, once tapped, until it is empty. When they realized their error they sent out the word and every kid who was ‘in’ came by to help — by drinking what they could, and carrying the rest out to the storm drain in whatever skillets and pots we could manage. Fifty gallons is one hell of a lot of beer, but we managed to get the keg emptied (mostly into the storm drain — probably a lot of drunk rats that evening) before Lyle showed up, but the rest of the evening was a hilarious disaster because the staff was drunk out of their minds.

Naturally, it was Wednesday. The square-dancers were there in get-ups that would make any Mexican fiesta-planner envious. The cooks were roaring drunk, making mistakes left and right. Tossed salads literally were tossed. At one point one of the chefs absent-mindedly set down his pen on another chefs pizza, unrealized. It went into the oven, then to the table, before the first chef realized where his pen was. Lyle was notified, and he ran over to the table where the pizza had just been served, announced that the diners had just ordered the 10,000th pizza from the restaurant, and that it was free… and then, with a touch ot perfect showmanship, reached down into the pizza, pulled out the pen, and said, “And, you get a free pen, too!”

Peter B. Newman