Leroy by JR Hightower

 Plaza Café - Excerpt from "Leroy"

JR Hightower grew up in Alamogordo, New Mexico. 

He is a restauratuer , entrepreneur, and raconteur.  "Leroy"

(not yet published) will be JR's second book. His first book, 

"Alone on Pasture Ridge" is available on Amazon.

In 1946, Judge Howard Beacham who owned the Plaza Café, decided to retire from the restaurant business and work at just one job - being Magistrate Judge. 

Leroy took possession of the Plaza Café on Christmas Day, 1946. He had convinced his brother Harold to come to Alamogordo to help with painting and cleaning up the café during the week between Christmas and New Years; closing and cleaning the restaurant that week became a tradition for many years. The inside of the Plaza Café was presented with a new coat of paint every Christmas. 

The whole family scrubbed, cleaned and removed the mounted deer and antelope heads, Mexican sombreros and serapes from the walls.  Harold refinished the counter and the twenty-four swivel seats. The wooden counter was beautiful; the back bar behind the counter was a lighted pie case with sliding glass doors on the front and storage cabinets underneath. Small individual breakfast cereal boxes were stacked on top and a big mirror ran the length of the counter. 

Leroy Hightower re-opened the Plaza Café under new ownership on January 2, 1947. The dining room seated 86 people and another 75 would fit in the banquet room in the back- not big by today’s standards, but after World War II in Alamogordo, New Mexico in a town with a population of less than 7,000, it was impressive. The Plaza Bar, the only bar with a liquor license in the city limits, used the banquet room as a dance hall on weekend nights.  

The cafe’s lunch counter ran almost the length of the dining room. It turned and went to the east wall, leaving just enough room for a row of chairs by the front wall for guests waiting for a table. 

On the east wall, in the center of the mirror over the pie case that served as the back bar of the counter, there was always a big bouquet of fresh flowers, a nice touch in the desert. The counter and chair backs were crafted from durable oak. The same sturdy woodwork was still beautiful and in use when Leroy sold the Plaza Café twenty-five years later. 

A filling station was on the corner of the property at 10th and Pennsylvania Avenue (later named White Sands Boulevard).  The bar on the north side and the cafe on the east side formed an L  around the back side of the parking lot. 

The adobe buildings were covered in stucco in traditional Mexican style with vigas (large pine logs) serving as rafters for the roof. Vigas are often topped with latillas (sticks laid in patterns over the logs) to finish the ceiling, but the Plaza ceiling was more appropriate for a restaurant. (Latilla sticks can attract bugs, little critters, spider webs, and dust bunnies). The area between the vigas was stuccoed into a half-moon concave arch halfway up each side of the log to create a bright, clean look.  

The traditional New Mexico adobe building - made from mud and logs and sticks, served as the main architecture in southwest towns and villages. Filled with oak furniture and counters, the cafe looked especially inviting during the dark, desert evenings. The vigas outside the bar were encircled in neon; the roofline of the cafe and the filling station were outlined in the bright white light which cut through the dark. 

Noble neon gas ran through long tubes which had been twisted into shapes with a torch by a skilled glass bender. Internal electrodes were inset into the cylinders filled with neon and then hermetically sealed by clamping and melting the glass ends together.    

Each letter had its own transformer and when a bombardment of electric volts were applied to the electrodes, the gas ionized in the tubes causing it to emit brilliant liquid fire. The internal electrodes in the luminous tubes prevented degradation of the neon by sputtering and crackling. 

 The first sight travelers saw as they approached Alamogordo at night were two competing signs over the gas station edged in neon cutting through the darkness: one, a metal Mobil Oil sign with its Pegasus logo, and one a polished aluminum rocket about 20 feet long, outlined in blue and green neon with an exhaust tail of orange flashing neon. The rocket had Plaza Café written on both sides in red neon directing hungry customers to their future meal. 

                                    Plaza Cafe at Night    

V-2 rockets had recently been captured from Germany, and along with former Nazi scientists and engineers, who had rather come to work at the White Sands Proving Grounds instead of face punishment for their collusion with the former German government, had secretly arrived in the desert to help the Army begin experimenting with rockets.  

The military's effort to emulate Germany's rocketry had thus far proved disastrous.  The first rocket tumbled end over end and bounced off the mountain above Alamogordo.  The second ended up in Juarez, Mexico's graveyard - an appropriate ending.  "Operation Paperclip," was put in place by the federal government and deals were made to sneak the formerly fascist scientists and their families out of Germany and into the United States. 

When the program became successful, Alamogordo became known as “The Rocket City,” and Leroy joined the city's booster promotion with his highly identifiable, silver rocket gleaming in the sky above the Plaza parking lot. The German families slowly integrated into Otero County's acceptance. Their children enrolled in local schools, they joined local Catholic or Lutheran churches, moved into existing neighborhoods, and eventually the pain of the war quelled between former local soldiers and foreign "Hun" scientists until the former hatreds are practically unknown by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren today. 

Former Plaza owner Judge Howard Beacham agreed to stay on for a while to help Leroy in the kitchen. Leroy’s wife, Cecilia, who had flirted with a career in movies in Hollywood as a singer and dancer, got the contact information of her friend, Foster Exline, an executive chef at a supper club in California. Leroy talked him into moving to Alamogordo so the Plaza Café could have a bona fide chef.  

                                Cecilia O'Hagin Hightower

Foster settled right in and went to work about 3 a.m.  He began each day with a 5-gallon pot of Farmers Brothers brand coffee using city water that was plumbed into the coffee maker so he and early customers and staff could help themselves. 

The natural gas fired Bunn coffee maker had two 5 gallon coffee pots with site glass tubes to view the level of the coffee. Each side had a spigot at the bottom and was heated to 210 degrees; hot water was available on demand through a third spigot in the center between the two rectangular coffee containers. This water was used for hot tea and Sanka (the modern powdered decaf of the 1940’s and 50’s).  

A clean towel was tied over the spigot of the freshest coffee in order for the staff to know to use the other pot first. If there was no towel on either of them, they knew to watch the level of the only pot they had and brew a new pot before they ran out. The wait staff would fill their glass bubble-shaped pots from the 5-gallon dispenser, then set the coffee carafes on single burner hot plates in the wait stations. 

The combination of Alamogordo water and the Farmer Brothers brand created a robust coffee. A pungent, carmelly fragrance filled the cafe when the hot “rocket fuel” was brewed in the morning.

The coffee maker was enclosed so oxygen did not get to the coffee. This enabled it to stay fresh longer because the oil in coffee oxidizes quickly when it is exposed to air. Oxidation makes the oil in coffee beans rancid and causes the coffee to taste bitter and old. 

Ground coffee oxidizes when exposed to air, too, so it needs to be sealed in an airtight container after it is opened. Coffee companies vacuum the air out of coffee cans to remove oxygen - which is why a new can of coffee goes “swoosh” - sucking in air when the seal is broken.  

Foster would put twenty to thirty pounds of bacon to blanch in the oven and about as much link sausage and par cook it. All of Foster's delicacies were made from scratch. Sausage drippings were the secret ingredient in the waffle batter, giving a subtle hint of flavor to the puffy, crispy gridded cakes.  Bacon drippings were added into the pancake batter and to season the beans and vegetables. The par cooked bacon and sausage would later be browned to order on the 36-inch flat grill, along with individual orders of eggs, hash browns, toast, and pancakes.  

Two huge old waffle irons were set up every morning on the line that was converted into a steam table for lunch and dinner. Three 4-slice toastmasters were on the shelf where the bread was stored, over the table where finished orders were picked up by the wait staff.

The waitresses called out their orders to the cook, there was no ticket hung. When you were feeding 150 to 300 people breakfast, it would get intense and the cooks were incredible in organizing plates and other clues to remember all those orders. 

Leroy’s nephew, Tommie Carl Herrell, started washing dishes at the Plaza and worked his way up to cook. Tommie and his friend, Jimmie Randall, both cooked at the Plaza in their teen years; Jimmie also cooked at Holloman Air Base in one of the military club’s kitchens.

Foster put big pots of stock, one beef and one chicken, on to boil all day for soup and other ingredients. He started the lunch specials with “Boiled Beef” on Tuesdays. It was just cubed beef but the long stringy muscles of the shoulders were skillfully cut short so when they were boiled in the beef stock from the day before, the meat was melt-in-your-mouth tender.  

Boiled beef, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken potpie, and beef stew daily specials ran Monday through Friday. Meat specials were served in 8 ounce, oval green china ramekins in the entrée section of the plate so the juice would not run off. Other lunch specials were served on sectioned luncheon plates without the ramekins to eliminate washing more dishes. The special included an entrée, two sides, and endless hot, fresh, yeast rolls.  

Foster made rolls every day from scratch. The daily special cost around 65 cents. On Sunday, it might be turkey and dressing with all the trimmings, roast beef, or roast pork for 95 cents. The favorite after-church entree was turkey dinner. Five or six thirty-pound turkeys were cooked. If there was any meat left, it was used for open-faced hot turkey sandwiches or in the club sandwiches. 

Newspaper Flyer

Foster made 12 to 24 pies three times a week and kept the big pie case full - or tried to; he just could not seem to bake enough pies. He bragged that he could whip up a baker’s dozen (13) egg whites and sugar into enough meringue to top 10 pies. 

The chef called the newspaper weekly, and told them the lunch and dinner specials so they could have the menu inserts printed and delivered in time to be placed in the lunch menus. Foster never seemed to be in a hurry or flustered because he was so organized and efficient. He cooked and baked the best food imaginable.  

The slight, balding chef wore a long sleeve, white dress shirt (instead of a chef jacket) with his checkered chef pants and a long white apron. He rolled the shirtsleeves up and somehow managed to stay clean. Foster stayed with Leroy until he sold the restaurant 25 years later and then stayed at the Plaza Bar with Amelia and Mike Musgrove after that.

The café was a success from the first day partly because of the location, an increasing military population stationed into the area, Leroy’s skill running a restaurant and his ability to put the right person in the right place at the right time, and moving out of the way to let his staff do their jobs.  

After the first year, Leroy paid his loan back early from Felix Loggains, bought his father, Pop, a ’47 Mercury, and bought himself another ’47 Packard. He became a part of the community even though he was a “come-to-town soldier” and not one of the “old guard” families of ranchers, farmers, or businessmen who had been there since the end of the last century.

The late 40’s and early 50’s were great economic times in Alamogordo; the town doubled its population in the 1940’s and doubled again in the 1950’s. Leroy’s sister, Mary, and brother-in-law, Gordon Herrell, arrived after their Oklahoma farm “blew out,” and they had a big auction sale and moved to Alamogordo in the Fall of 1950.  

Mary had severe arthritis and the dry climate of Alamogordo was said to be good for her and she did seem to get around much better than she did in the humid Oklahoma air. With all the building and construction going on in Alamogordo, Leroy’s brother, Harold, had shown up and done well with his paint contracting business; he welcomed his brother-in-law, Gordon, to help him. 

In 1954, Leroy allowed his son, Junior, to work in the restaurant operation of the Plaza Café and he began to report to Foster after school. Twice a week the Peyton Packing Company in El Paso brought swinging beef carcasses in a truck to Alamogordo and occasionally sent in special shipments because the cafe's walk-in refrigerator was not very big. 

Leroy thought it would be helpful for Junior’s football weight training to help with hoisting the carcasses. Foster would not allow Peyton Packing Company to unload any side of beef that weighed less than 400 pounds. That would insure that it came off a minimum 1,200-pound steer. The young bovines’ weight before butchering was one-third head, horns, hooves, hide and innards, one-third right side, and one third left side.  

When the Peyton truck came in, Foster would climb up into  the back, inspect and select his sides of beef from the swinging beef hanging on big hooks suspended from the rails on the ceiling of the truck. After Foster chose his beeves, the drivers could unload the meat and hang the beef quarters on hooks close to the cutting table in the back room of the kitchen. 

Even then there wasn’t much market for “prime” grade beef, a grade higher than choice. Prime beef is marbled (fattier), better tasting and from bigger beef cattle, making the meat to bone ratio better (i.e., a 300 pound side has almost as much bone in it as a 500 pound side), so it is more expensive per pound of meat. 

But sometimes Peyton had “prime” beef they would sell to the cafe at the “choice” price because they knew Leroy and Foster liked the best grade available and because the Plaza was such a steady customer. 

Leroy’s son, Junior, was a big ol’ kid and his new job was to help the chef “work up” the beef. With a couple of knives and a handsaw, Foster would cut up the beef quarters - he was a slight man but strong as a bull. Junior received an invaluable education, learning which cuts came from which parts of the steer.  

He learned how grocery stores sell beef “round,” a section of beef from the cow's hindquarters, as sirloin tips. The round is connected to the sirloin, but it has two big tendons (gristle) running the full width and length of it. It does not have enough fat to roast, will dry out before the gristle breaks down, and is too tough to cook quickly like steak. The best thing to do with it is to grind it up. 

Junior and Foster carried the large beef quarters to the walk-in and hung them up on the meat hooks. The chef would not let the boy unhook a whole quarter and carry it to the table alone because he said the youngster didn’t know how to lift that much weight yet. 

But the tough, slight man must have been strung with tendons and gristle running through him because he deftly handled 150 pound beef quarters on his back yelling for everyone to get out of the way as he wrangled the seven cubic feet of meat onto the cutting table. 

 Quality cuts of the side of beef needed a good deal of fat trimmed off; the fat would be thrown in a big stew pot and saved in the walk-in. A bull hindquarter would come in about once a week. Bulls do not have the fat steers do; they are almost all red meat which cooks up with great flavor but tastes tough and dry. The bull meat would be ground up with the fat in the walk-in to create a good grade of ground beef. (Bull meat can no longer be bought for human consumption because of added hormones and gene alteration. It is sold for pet food, though). 

The Plaza sold lots of hamburger during the lunch specials: stuffed bell peppers, spaghetti and meatballs, ground sirloin steak, and hundreds of hamburgers and cheeseburgers every week at lunch and dinner. There were also mock filets on the menu (a 12 or 14 ounce ground beef patty wrapped in bacon). 

Foster took the rounds, deboned them, and then used the eye (part of the round) and top rounds for chicken fried steak and the bottom rounds were used for roast beef. The trimmings went in the ground beef and the bones into the stockpot. New York steak and filet mignon were customer favorites and #109 bone-in ribs were used for prime rib on weekends.  

Occasionally, when they did not need all the #109s for prime rib, the rib bones were cut off and put in the rib pot and Delmonico steaks were cut from the lip of the rib eye. The beef ribs and short ribs would be used for evening specials. The chuck was used for boiled beef and roast beef, and the remaining forequarters were ground. Every part of the cow was used except the moo. 

One of the biggest sellers was the Plaza Club Steak. It was a 9-10 ounce top sirloin. The short loin was cut up for porterhouse and T-bone steaks. In addition, the loin strips became New York steaks and the tenders were cut into filet mignons. 

The porterhouse steaks were huge, about 35 to 40 ounces, with part of the tail left on that hung over the edge of the platter. The remaining bones and blubbery parts were put in Foster’s stockpots with onions, celery, carrots and whatever other fresh vegetable trimmings were around. 

    Vegetable beef soup was on the menu every day to help use up the beef stock the chef constantly boiled. The broth was made into gravy for hot beef open-faced sandwiches, and used in roast beef dinners. 

    Occasionally Foster would make French onion soup with toasty bread and cheese melted like lava on top of the comforting concoction. Chicken necks, giblets, tails, and other trimmings went into the chicken stockpot and ended up as cream of chicken soup, chicken noodle soup, chicken and rice soup or chicken and turkey gravy for hot turkey sandwiches, turkey and dressing and chicken potpie. 

    After the beef was cut, put away and the table cleaned, Foster went home and Junior became the pot washer. The bakery table was scrubbed with Clorox water and the top layer scrubbed off with a Chore Girl copper mesh pad, until it almost made a paste of water and wood. A dough cutter was used to scrape off the paste and water into a trash bucket so the table would not be contaminated; it was air dried and not wiped down with a possibly tainted cloth.  

    At closing time, the butcher-block table had to be done the same way. The cut marks from the knives were scraped off so the bacteria would not have a place to grow and the chlorine in the Clorox killed any bacteria on the table and sanitized the scraper. 

    On the weekdays when there were no meat deliveries, they baked pies. Junior rolled out pie crusts as quickly as possible, but Foster would get disgusted and roll out a crust or two himself in quick time just to show his rookie how it was done. On Sundays, Foster went home right after lunch. He worked a short day on Monday, too.  

    Leroy would not allow Junior to operate the big dishwasher; it was an automatic conveyor fed dish-washing machine which used 210-degree water to rinse. Leroy warned Junior that he might get his shirt tail caught in it and be pulled in, but he did wash glasses on the double sided glass washer with the center turned one way and the outside turned the other. An unfortunate lesson was learned about what happens if a finger nail gets caught by the whirling brushes, ripping the nail right off.  

    Added to the staff was a rotund, wizened cook that would sit on a 50-pound lard can next to the butcher block and smoke. If Junior had all the pots washed, the cook would let him make food orders. The growing boy had to be careful over the grill so he wouldn’t burn his belly because he was not yet quite tall enough to reach all the way across it. 

    The kitchen equipment included a large automatic potato peeler that held about 20 pounds of potatoes. It spun around and grated the skin off with friction, then the “eyes” needed to be cut out of the potatoes. Carrots and turnips could be peeled in it, too, but Foster did not like that new fangled contraption and preferred it be done the old-fashioned way. 

    

    The prep staff tended to leave the potatoes in the peeler for an extra amount of time so they did not have to “eye” them. The potatoes would come out almost perfectly round with about half their original weight when they were left in the peeler too long.  

    Junior would work up five or six, 5-gallon buckets of raw French fries every afternoon. The peeled and cut fresh French fries were soaked in water with a little “Tater White” (a chemical additive to keep potatoes from turning brown - now banned). Then, the five gallon buckets were put in the walk-in for the cooks to use on the night shift.  A bucket sat on the floor by the fryer that had a big strainer on top to drain the potatoes. If they were not drained before they were put in the fryer, the water would cause a fuss making the hot oil foam and pop.

  
    At first, Junior had a little trouble remembering all the orders without tickets and the cook would sometimes have to bail him out. He was ribbed about potentially burning his belly and when he did not dry the potatoes enough before letting them down into the grease, the grease would fly into his face like fireworks on the Fourth of July. 

    The cooks prepared and put the entrées and garnish on the plate, and then the waitress would get her own sides from the steam table. Fresh yeast rolls waited on a rack over the hotline to proof. Junior learned to estimate from the number of previous orders when another pan needed to go up to proof and to put the proofed ones in to cook, and to take them out and not burn them. A waitress would sometimes remind the cook when the rolls were getting low; everyone fussed if the endless, yeasty rolls ran out. 

    The Plaza’s competition was the Coronado Café across 10th Street on the Southeast corner of the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 10th. It was owned and operated by a Mediterranean man who everyone called “the Greek.”  

 

 

    One-half block south of the Coronado was the Wagon Wheel Café. The Wagon Wheel was a lot smaller than the Plaza and the Coronado. It was run at that time by an energetic, saucy woman who looked a bit like country singer Patsy Cline. Lola Mae always wore a white starched hat held on with bobby pins and she was quick with a hearty greeting when a customer entered the door situated between two wagon  wheel windows.  

    The Alamogordo Hotel at 9th Street and New York Avenue also had a coffee shop.  In addition, there were three drug store soda fountains: Felix F. Loggains’ Corner Drug, on the southwest corner of 10th Street and New York Avenue; Walter Lafferty’s Alamo Drug, on the northwest corner of 10th and New York; and Johnny Rolland’s Rexall Drug a few doors south of the Corner Drug on New York Avenue. 
    All three had good soda fountains, sold sandwiches, and light faire in addition to sodas and ice cream items. However, nobody else had an executive chef like Foster Exline.

             

    Eber McKinley opened the Desert Aire in 1957 and leased the restaurant to Ramona and Bill Duncan. Ramona was one of Leroy’s former waitresses. Denny O’Hara opened the new Rocket dining room about the same time. A small café at Seventh and Pennsylvania later became Margo’s. There was the Mountain View Cafe just north of Indian Wells on the west side of Pennsylvania. (It stayed open all night and had a good pinball machine).

    Leroy said that when a new restaurant opens it won’t take all your business, it will take some of everybody's business. He said when new cafes opened, you had to do a better job than they do to compete. That’s why competition makes everybody better, or you don’t stay in business.

    In the 50’s came the Hi-D-Ho Drive-In on south Pennsylvania Avenue and the Red Rooster at 1500 North Pennsylvania, right across the street from the north end of the Alamo Courts that Leroy would eventually own.

jrhightower50@yahoo.com