Food Service Taught Work Ethic
Bad airline food is a well-worn joke, one that Joseph Brennan doesn’t contradict. He can speak with more authority than most, at least as far as 1960s-era in-flight meals are concerned — he used to prepare breakfasts for flights out of Albany, N.Y.
“The things I prepared didn’t make me challenge the assumption that airplane food wasn’t that good,” said Brennan, senior vice president of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association and a native of upstate New York. “I wouldn’t say it was particularly appetizing.”
At the time, Brennan was a high school kid who worked in a restaurant near the airport. His job required a 3:30 a.m. wake-up so he’d be able to make the eggs and sausage, encase them in tinfoil and drive the food to the airport. Never having flown on an airplane and therefore untouched by the angst that airports provoke in most passengers, he found the experience pleasant and interesting. And because celebrities such as Bob Hope and Sammy Davis Jr. performed at a nearby theater and sometimes flew out of Albany, Brennan could brag that he’d cooked for some big-time names in his day — even if he wasn’t 100 percent sure they actually consumed his breakfast cuisine.
Brennan fell back on restaurant work off and on for most of his youth and young adulthood, picking up jobs as a busboy, waiter, short-order cook and bartender.
“It’s not that I had any particular love for it,” he said — it’s just that it was something he’d always done.
It could be tense work, especially bartending during the occasional mad rush. One restaurant was in a hotel that held a number of conventions, so every time a session ended, Brennan was inundated with thirsty convention-goers and their requests for frozen daiquiris or Pink Ladies.
“I learned to deal with pressure, working behind the bar,” Brennan said, adding that it put him in contact with a new crowd almost every day. In contrast, another job at a local neighborhood bar gave him a different experience, one where he got to know the regulars.
While those jobs peppered his younger years as he attended law school in Boston, his entry into the professional law sector — he had just begun clerking for a Massachusetts attorney — came to an abrupt and unexpected halt when he was called home because his father became ill. An optometrist, his father was unable to run his optometry center.
Brennan learned early on how to fix glasses and simple tasks like that — but he couldn’t exactly take over while his father was indisposed. But even if Brennan couldn’t step in and do the work, he and his family knew it was important not to let the center close for long stretches of time. If too many customers showed up to find locked doors, they’d stop coming altogether.
When his father came back to the business, Brennan headed for Connecticut.
His law career moved him into the CBIA, where he left food service work of all stripes behind. But he credits those early years with helping instill an attitude he needed when his lobbying and law career took off.
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