It was a suggestion from her mom and a bike ride that serendipitously led Colleen Williams to a career as a restaurant server that would end up spanning 50 years at several area restaurants.
On April 10, Williams celebrated the milestone at Lombard’s Egg House, with family, friends, and current and former coworkers sharing in the special event.
The irony, she said, was that April 10 was also her birthday, and it was on her 16th birthday that her mother “suggested I get a job.”
She recalled that when her mom made the suggestion, “I said to her, ‘I don’t have a car.’ She said, ‘But you have a bike.’”
Living in Glendale Heights at the time, “I got on my bike and just started pedaling,” Williams continued, and she wound up at a strip mall on North Avenue, where there was a restaurant called Peking Mandarin.
“I went in there,” she recounted, and was offered a job as a waitress so “I jumped on it.”
“Back then that’s what they were called,” Williams added with a chuckle.
“It was the best thing,” she said of the chance to make some money. “I was able to buy a [used] car in a couple of months.”
One day, “My [future] boss from Mr. G’s came in for dinner … and offered me a job for the breakfast shift,” she narrated, adding that she ended up working nights at Peking Mandarin and mornings at Mr. G’s in Elmhurst.
Williams worked at Peking Mandarin for five years and at Mr. G’s for 25 years, and at Egg Harbor in Elmhurst for 13 years.
Fifty years later, the Lombard resident is still going full steam, currently working at Egg House, where she has been for seven years, “on weekends and filling in every chance I can get during the week.” She also works at Madison’s in Willowbrook on Thursday nights, where she has been serving for 10 years.
Williams seemed to delight in looking back over her 50-year career, saying, “It wasn’t hard work … I took the job seriously, every day was different, and I was also like a therapist.”
She recalled how she got to know her customers and in one instance, around 2005, a customer “once sent my family of five to Disney World!”
Williams gave credit to the proprietors of Mr. G’s, saying that being mentors, “I’m always grateful to them; they’re like family.”
She still worked while raising three sons in Wheaton with her husband, Dan (now married 45 years)—and with her working the breakfast shift at Mr. G’s, “My husband was always a big help with the early hours.”
Early, Williams said, because “I was opening the doors at 5:30 in the morning!”
When asked if she faced any challenges, Williams responded, “I don’t know that there are any challenges. It’s kept me so active.”
While serving food has not changed, there have been changes in the industry, she said.
Besides the “white polished shoes and the uniform … orders used to go on a little check stub and on to the carousel [for the cook],” whereas now much of the orders get relayed through a computerized system, Williams noted.
Nowadays, servers get training in everything from sexual harassment to handling liquor, Williams outlined; concepts that didn’t exist when she was 16.
But for her, the joys of the job are what she continues to focus on: “I get to be myself every single day,” she pointed out, and said she always enjoys “the people that I’ve come in contact with.”
During the celebration on April 10, “I thanked my [late] mom for making that suggestion on my 16th birthday,” Williams said.
Her son Stephen also spoke, stating how “Over the years, it has not just been about serving, it’s been about getting to know people’s stories.
She’s watched families grow and heard of the good times and the hardships; she memorized countless orders before you could even sit down.”
He went on to say that he and his brothers “felt like celebrities” when they went to the restaurant where their mom worked—they were treated to “unlimited chocolate milk.”
Williams described herself as “a morning person” who goes to her health club—and she has no intention of retiring.
“I hope I can get in ten more years,” she summed up. “I’ve been lucky that my body has allowed me to do what I’ve enjoyed all these years.”
