By Randy Capps

Travel back with me to the fall of 1997. As a newly minted senior at Gardner-Webb, I had a head full of hair and a heart full of dreams.

I also had a money problem.

Since I was tired of living on campus, paying for laundry and dodging RAs when I wanted to run afoul of GWU’s regulations, my roommate and I found a place off campus to hang our hats for our senior year.

So, in addition to my 35.5 hours worth of course work that would get me a degree in May, my 10-hour work study radio shift at WGWG on Sundays and my part-time gig at what was then known as Shelby Headline News, I needed some more income.

As it turns out, Ichabod’s Eatery in Uptown Shelby was hiring. Despite the fact that my only restaurant experience was ordering food off a menu, I got a job in the kitchen.

It was one of the most memorable and character shaping experiences of my life. I bounced back and forth between the salad station and the sandwich station/fryer station.

This is where I learned that wings and fries are ready when they float in the grease. I learned how to make a club sandwich, down to slathering on the devil’s condiment (mayo) onto sandwiches.

The kitchen manager taught me how to cook a steak, including a killer marinade that I still use 30 years later in my own kitchen. Trigger was a cool guy. Never too excited, never upset — in other words, the perfect guy to run a busy kitchen with people yelling and screaming and tickets flying around like confetti on New Year’s Eve.

Ah, New Year’s Eve. This is when I picked up a few other things. The kitchen was supposed to close at 11, and we were all planning to wander 15 paces over to the bar to ring in 1998 properly.

I don’t know what the safe occupancy of that building was, but we were flirting with it. Shelby was not the cosmopolitan place it is today, so there really wasn’t another place to hang out.

At 10:45, there had to be 20 tickets on the board, and I was dropping and shaking chicken wings with both hands as fast as I could.

The owner walks in and says, “boys, can we stay open?” Since none of us were leaving anyway, we agreed, and the busiest night of restaurant work I ever had ran on until about 1 a.m. (we did pause briefly when the clock struck midnight).

Shag walks in when we’re cleaning up and hands every one of us a $100 bill, which for a guy who ate ramen noodles when he didn’t have a shift in the kitchen, was a lot of money.

He kept the bar open for us, too.

I was “Capps” or “college boy” to the guys in the kitchen, and they all pitched in and got me a gift when I graduated and left town.

That year was crazy for me in so many ways, but those guys and that restaurant made it special.

So, remember that the next time your wings are a little overdone, will you?