Gloria McAdam has not eaten a doughnut in nearly 30 years.
She can stare down a Dunkin’ Donuts impassively, unmoved at the sight of doughnut-filled bins stacked high behind the counter. Chocolate icing, jelly-filled, Boston-crème: all are as nothing to her. And one summer at Dan Dee Donuts was all it took.
Now the president and CEO for FoodShare, a regional food bank, McAdam spent a summer during college behind the counter of the New York chain, where doughnuts were all mixed and fried on site.
“You come home smelling like the grease,” she said. “You feel like it’s in your hair and in your skin and in your pores, and you can’t wash it off.” Living with the constant, invasive smell of fried grease put her off doughnuts for life, but McAdams stuck it out for three months because college, after all, wasn’t going to pay for itself. McAdams had scholarships and loans to help out, but she needed a number of jobs to pay for her education.
Her working life had kicked into high gear at age 16, when she worked 30 hours a week at Dairy Queen and worked most of the day on Saturday at the local movie theater. This on top of extracurricular activities, homework, and caring for the horse she owned in her hometown of Gouverneur, New York.
“I actually didn’t have a day off. People say to me today, ‘I don’t know how you do everything you do.’ And I look back and say, ‘Today’s a piece of cake compared to what I used to do back then,’” she said.
McAdam worked the cash register and kept DQ customers supplied with blizzards and sundaes, as well as working the burgers-and-fries part of the restaurant. For cooking, she only ever worked the fryer. Curiously, only boys were allowed to work the grill — it was a bit sexist, actually, McAdam said.
A local couple owned both the Dairy Queen and the nearby theater in the small town, so McAdam got recruited for both jobs. The owners taught her about what it meant to be a good boss: They rewarded hard work, didn’t put up with slackers and made employees feel appreciated.
“They wouldn’t let you out the door at the end of the day without saying ‘thank you’ to you,” she said.
They set the standard for McAdam’s future employees, some of whom weren’t always as professional. In the slew of jobs that followed throughout college — aside from the life-changing doughnut experience — one other stands out as being particularly unpleasant.
As with most cafeteria operations, McAdam’s college cafeteria washed its plates by running them through a giant, industrial-strength washing machine. The plates would emerge on a conveyer belt, burning-hot to the touch, but McAdam’s job was to quickly remove those plates from the belt and stack them up.
You’d think that after a few hours your fingers would become deadened to the sizzling-hot plates, and the pain would dull. You would be wrong.
“I would feel like my fingers were going to burn right off,” she said. “That was the worst job I ever had in my life.”
That lasted one semester before McAdam hurried back to jobs that weren’t the pain equivalent of ripping Band-aids off or repeatedly stubbing your toe for hours on end.
She waitressed and worked at Ames Department store, happy to work in jobs that had some variety and human interaction; post-college, she went to work for the Boy Scouts of America and eventually Foodshare, where she’s been since 1979.
