Our training as dietitians was divided into three sections: Diet Therapy, where you wrote menus and gave diet instructions to patients; Food Service, where you supervised the serving of meals; and The Main Kitchen, where you were supposed to supervise the making of meals.

I had rather dreaded the Kitchen part of the experience thinking I'd have no interest in cooking large quantities of food and supervising all those men.

We started out by having to spend a day in each of the major areas. In the bake house there were three main cooks - Joe who was Italian and tall and skinny and rather rude, and Peter and Paul who were short and black and rather shy. Joe taught me how to quickly shape bread rolls. I think he found having interns around rather a bore, but we enjoyed all his lighthearted banter.

The next day I spent in the main butchering block. The main cook there was a big mean looking black man, John. I was scared of him, and even more so when I found out and reported that meat was missing. But he never threatened me in any way - just ignored me.

The next day I spent with Sigmund the diet cook. Sigmund was from Poland and when he found out that I had ancestors from Poland too, he decided to teach me some Polish words. It was "Yacta Mache" from then on, whenever he saw me, which I think meant Good Day. Sigmund had an unenviable job, because the diet food was pretty dull and awful. The cooks were supposed to taste everything before it was sent up, but Sigmund didn't seem to do this. He knew nobody was going to appreciate his cooking. But this sweet gentle old man certainly captured my heart. He once said to me, "Miss Wyngarden, you shouldn't be a dietitian. You’re not made for a job like this. The only place in this hospital that I want to see you when you finish your internship is on E-l" That was the maternity floor.

The last day of orientation was spent with the head cooks - Wilfred, who we called Willy, was a short feisty white man and his deputy Otis who was a tall handsome black man. Willy liked being boss, and he was very aware of his status.  He got things done, and very quickly too, but his superior attitude over the blacks in the kitchen made him somewhat unpopular with the men.

Otis I think I fell in love with from the first day I met him. He took me aside, and I wondered what in heaven's name he was going to say. "You don't know about us, do you?" I hadn't a clue what he meant. "You have never had contact with many black people before, have you?" he continued, and when I admitted it, he said, "You look so scared, like we're going to hurt you. We're just like you and you'll soon get used to us." And it was very true that before many weeks were over I had stopped seeing black men as being black, and even went so far as to ask one of them if he'd managed to get a suntan on vacation. As soon as I realized what I said I was thoroughly embarrassed, but it just goes to show how I'd come to think of them as just the same as those of us who long for a suntan.

Otis became my special confidant in the kitchen. I spent long periods chatting with him when I didn't have any other jobs. I told him about my love life, or more correctly the usual lack of it, and about my plans for- the future, and all sorts of things. He didn't talk about himself much other than to say he had a very pretty wife. It was Otis who told me to stop going out with Frank.

Besides Otis, my next favorite was Mike. Mike worked in the nourishment area. He was Cuban, and divorced and he really fancied himself as a lady killer. I enjoyed his flirting and no doubt flirted back, because one night when it was my job to stay on late and lock up, he stayed back too, and when the two of us were alone he started kissing me. I was really scared by it, thinking he might get carried away and out of control, but I managed to get him to go home before too long. I have a feeling however, that the story went the rounds of the others in the main kitchen because the other men used to wink at me when I went by after that.

When I went home I went immediately to tell my best friend, Carolyn, about the experience. We had been told that we must never have any social intercourse of any sort with the employees even to the extent of not being allowed to go to Sandy the secretary's house for coffee when we were invited. Dating employees was certainly not allowed, and we were told we would be kicked out if we disobeyed the rules. Patients were also a no-go area for dating. Carolyn gave me her attention and support, as she had done when I told her about my dismal failure with John, and told me not to let myself get into a stupid situation like that again.

Going back to the kitchen staff, another of the men I liked was Jose. He was a Puerto Rican with a great sense of fun. He was in charge of the vegetable preparation area. He used to have a selection of fake mice that he placed in appropriate places to get our reactions. And we certainly played into his hands. My fear of mice is well documented.

There was one skinny black man, Melvin, who worked in the storeroom, who I didn't really like much. He reminded me of the trouble maker in Porgy and Bess. He bragged about all the children he had begotten, although he said he didn't know who or where they were, and he made a big point of kissing us all before we left, and saying he thought we should know what it was like to be kissed by a black man. In fact we were kissed by quite a few of the cooks, black and white, when we were saying our goodbyes, and I remember a special long elevator ride with my old friend Mike. And I certainly had tears in my eyes when I gave Otis a last hug and kiss.

Hector

After my pleasant experiences in the Main Kitchen, I was less pleased with the work in Food Service. Mainly we had to supervise the delivery of the trays to the patients, and although I enjoyed talking to the patients I found this part of the job boring. One of the wards we had to pay special attention to was called C-l, the isolation ward mostly full of TB patients. We had to put on sterile gowns and masks to go into the ward, and the menus had to be autoclaved. The experience was rather daunting except for the fact that the food service worker for C-l was a very attractive Puerto Rican called Hector. He was divorced, and his ex-wife still lived in Central America. He was small and lithe and very pleasant and he developed a crush on me.

I first found out about it from Jose. Hector wrote me a note in Spanish and I hadn't a clue as to what it said. So I asked Jose to translate it for me, and it was full of praise and longing for me and asking me if I'd go out with him. I was flattered to say the least, since my ego had been thoroughly flattened by John and then Frank's rejections of me, and the thought that this very nice man found me attractive was very tempting indeed, even though I knew the rules. I decided not to go out with him, but I didn't discourage him from making friendly advances, and he phoned me at the nurses’ home, and I pretended to everyone else he was the man I'd met at the medical fair.

After a few weeks he got a transfer from the kitchen service to the transport division of the hospital. I don't know if he did it deliberately, or would have done it anyway, but I then felt justified in dating him as he was no longer one of my employees. The first time we went out we met on the Staten Island ferry. We didn't want to be seen together near the hospital just in case I should get in trouble. Then we took the subway uptown and went for a walk through Central Park, doing our share of rolling in the grass as well. We also went boating on the lake and did all the typical courting couples sorts of things that one sees in Central Park.

I did feel guilty about seeing him however, and I went up to see a staff dietitian who'd recently come to work in the therapeutics department to talk it over. She was called Juanita, and she was part Mexican. She'd come from California where she'd had an unhappy love affair. She lived on the floor above us in the nurses’ home and although she was older than we were, and a staff member to boot, we always felt like she was one of us, and a good friend.

Juanita had been dating Crawford, who was black, for most of the time since she'd arrived. I thought that maybe if I told her about my dating Hector she'd be able to give me some advice. I had the idea that probably I was dating him as a sort of way of testing my own racial prejudice. Hector was a handsome man but he was very obviously not white and I did wonder how I would feel being coupled with him. I thought part of my wanting to date him related to this desire to try out the experiment, because he had no intellectual appeal for me at all. So when I told Juanita about all this, she told me I was a fool, but that it was my life and that she wouldn't tell on me.

I really was putting her in an awkward position, considering that I was telling her about how I was breaking the rules in spirit if not in the actual letter of the rules since Hector was no longer employed by Food Service. Then I asked her, “When you go out with Crawford are you conscious of being with a black man and do you fell like people are looking at you?” She looked at me with such a pained expression on her face and said, “Jeanie, I’m not white.”

I had never noticed that. I knew Crawford and Hector were not white, but because I liked Juanita and felt she was my friend I assumed she was white, like me. But I did learn something from her. I knew that I was using Hector and that it was not a nice thing to do for whatever personal gratification it gave me.

I didn't see Hector for quite awhile after this but when he returned from his vacation he brought me a present. It was a tiny fancy tape measure that rolled up into a little square box. The note with it said, "Since you in me I sin no more.” Even though he meant “and” instead of “in”, I got the very strong impression that he took me far more seriously than I had thought and I felt very guilty.

I'm sure the men in the kitchen and food service all knew about me dating Hector. And although I smiled and said hello to him at work I didn't think I paid him more attention than I did of the others. I did tell Otis about how I was going out with someone that really wasn't quite acceptable to the status quo, and he said he understood why I was doing it. He had been very pleased when I stopped going out with Frank. I'm sure if he had been available it would have been Otis and not Hector that I would have done my racial prejudice experimenting on. And I'm pretty sure I kept the secret from all of the dietitians except Juanita, because when it came time to go, I did tell them all about it, and they were flabergasted.

Hector and I didn't go out very much after that. One time we went out we went to a film, The Ten Commandments, which we'd both seen before, but we sat near the back and didn't even try to watch the film. But I soon realized how unfair I was being to Hector. He really did like me and was getting involved and I was just using him to build up my ego, so I decided to stop seeing him.

I met him once more and we went for a walk around the town near the hospital with me trying to work up the courage to say I didn't want to go out with him again, but before I could get the words out, he asked me to marry him. I told him I didn't love him. He took it without any fuss, so I don't suppose he was very surprised.