33 years after her first grits, Columbia Waffle House manager hangs up her visor
From the grill to the cash register to the dining room, Myrtle Whitman’s everywhere. For 30 years, she’s been as much a part of this diner’s character as a scattered, smothered and covered pile of hash browns.
At mid-morning on a weekday, she’s smearing generous pats of butter on toast then ringing up an order then checking on the steaming grill then chatting with a customer at the counter. She tells him she’ll retire from Waffle House in a couple weeks after three decades managing this very restaurant.
Soon, she’ll be sitting in one of those booths she’s tended for half her life, a retiree enjoying the fruits of decades of loving labor at Columbia’s Unit #309 on Garners Ferry Road.
At 64, she’s a gentle sergeant among an army of troops clad in visors, aprons and face masks, following her example as a leader who’s as sweet as a chocolate chip waffle but as stern as a mother striving to keep her kids on the straight and narrow.
“This is going to be fun,” Whitman thought when she first walked into her new career 33 years ago.
An immigrant from Suriname on the northern coast of South America, Whitman had never set foot in a Waffle House — much less cooked an egg — when she first applied to one of the restaurants on Two Notch Road in 1988.
Her biggest challenge starting out, she said, was overcoming her strong Dutch accent and picking up on Southern slang, like “y’all.” Connecting with people, though, was easy — “Wherever I go, I just make friends with everybody. That is how I was raised, so it was no problem.”
One of her first weekends working as a server at the restaurant, it was busy, of course, and Whitman was hungry. She asked her manager, who was cooking orders on the grill, to fix her some eggs. “He looked at me and said, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to fix you any food. You cook it yourself.’
“I said, ’Oh lord, you don’t want me on that grill. I don’t know how to cook Waffle House,’” she recalled. “That is how I started to eat grits.”
Her first impression of grits was, well —
“They didn’t look app— ... I didn’t want to eat it,” she laughed. “But I was so hungry that I fixed me some bacon, I fixed me some sausage, I mashed it all up with some cheese and butter in the grits, and that is how I started eating grits. And I still love it like that.”
In a short time, Whitman was just as comfortable behind the grill as she was working any other job in the diner. Three decades later, the grill is still where she prefers to be.
A mentor and a mother
On the job, Whitman was molded by mentors who took her under their wings, she said.
Above all others, there was Melanie, who taught Whitman to keep the grill sparkling clean and to cool her “hot temper.”
It was Melanie who encouraged Whitman to reach higher and become a manager.
Whitman took over managing the Garners Ferry restaurant in 1991. The unit was in rough shape then, she said. She was sent in to turn it around, and the restaurant became a blockbuster under her leadership. When a new Waffle House eventually opened farther down Garners Ferry Road, many of her regular customers hopped over to try it out but quickly returned home, she said.
“I always treat my people the way I want to be treated,” Whitman said. “I talk to them the way I want to be talked to, because you catch much more flies with honey, and you get anything done if you be nice. I’ve always done that. I can be firm, and my customers, they knew it, too. I did not put up with some stuff.”
Melanie also taught Whitman how to lead other employees by example, she said. There’s no task Melanie — or Whitman — would ask someone else to do that they wouldn’t do themselves.
“You come in and you see them struggling, and you help them,” Whitman said. “That’s why with my people, I’m always here with them, and I always stand next to them.”
Like Melanie who mentored her, Whitman became that same kind of inspiring force for many people who worked under her — some for many years, including Sherry Jackson and Brenda Price, who’ve worked with Whitman for more than 30 years and just under 30 years, respectively.
“She made sure I know how to do everything,” said Jackson, who has been Whitman’s right-hand partner in running the restaurant when Whitman is off the clock.
Charles Gayle, a cook under Whitman in the mid-1990s, said his boss was “tough as nails” and would “always go the extra mile” right alongside her team.
“She holds her staff to a high standard. She’s firm, but she’s nice all at the same time,” said Gayle, who’s now a cook at a restaurant on the coast of Maine but still visits Whitman whenever he comes back home to Columbia about once a year.
Gayle was Whitman’s “problem child,” she said, fondly. She remembers him as a good cook, clean and honest, but whose mouth sometimes got him in trouble. “There are times I had to tell him, ‘I’m going to call your mother,’” she said. “I’m trying to keep him on the correct path. That was the hard part.
“I see them as my children,” she said of her employees.
Her own daughter worked at her restaurant for a time, too. When she was 16 and wanted a car, Whitman “put her to work. ... And she made it.”
Wanting to stay close to her family, Whitman never set her sights on moving higher up in the Waffle House corporate chain. She was at home right where she was.
Waffle House in her blood
Whitman’s an example of the long-running Waffle House culture that celebrates longstanding veteran workers, company spokesperson Njeri Boss said. It’s not that unusual to meet a Waffle House family member who’s spent multiple decades in the diners.
“You’re losing a family member. ... They’re not making a whole lot of Myrtles anymore,” Boss said. “Myrtle epitomizes what we try to train our new managers to do, is that they become the mayors of their little town here. ... They aren’t just running restaurants. They have to be the mom. They have to be the psychiatrist. They have to be the taxi drivers. They have to be a lot of things to a lot of people.”
What’s lost with the retirement of someone like Whitman is invaluable “memory of the way it was,” Boss said.
Whitman had expected to retire near the end of 2019 but agreed to work through the holidays. Then in early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic hit, and Whitman committed to sticking out the difficult months with her staff.
Now, though, she looks forward to letting go of the responsibilities she’s carried for so long. Her last day of work is March 8.
“There’s no ifs, ands or buts, I’m going to miss it,” Whitman said. “But I’m excited that I don’t have the responsibility on my shoulders anymore, because last year and now it is really rough.”
But she won’t be far away.
When her grandbabies come to visit her house on weekends, she’ll ask them what they want for breakfast. “Waffles!” they’ll say. They always do.
“Oh no! Not again!” she’ll say, and she’ll fire up the waffle iron.
Waffle House, she said, is “in my blood.”
