I was 16 and working at a Pizza Hut on a Friday night when the phone rang. I was busy making pizzas, but was also the closest person to the phone so I picked up and said, “Pizza Hut of Benton, how may I help you?”
Someone was disguising their voice by growling very low and said, “There’s a bomb in the building.” I wasn’t sure I heard correctly because of the growling on the other end and the jukebox playing on my end so I put a finger in my ear and asked, “What?”
“There’s a bomb in the building.” I heard that.
The manager of the Pizza Hut was known as Beagle. He was working the ovens, mostly cutting and bagging. We bagged pizza in those days before boxes. You had to cut the pizza on a cardboard circle and then slide that into a big bag that was tented and then folded and stapled.
I held the phone high and hollered, “Beagle! Telephone!” Beagle got on the phone for a few seconds then got off and looked pretty pissed. He called the police and reported the bomb threat. He turned to me since he didn’t have to explain what was going on. He directed me to pull all the pizzas out of the oven, shut off the ovens, and get the employees outside. I did as directed.
Beagle went to each table starting with the one closest to the exit. He calmly spoke to the customers, told them there was a problem concerning the building, and asked them to take their pizzas and exit to finish it picnic style over on the grassy embankment that bordered the parking lot. The last few tables were noticeably nervous as he got to them. I’m guessing most of them thought it might be a gas leak, but I’m sure word of the bomb threat spread quickly.
All the customers and employees were safely outside and away from the building when the first responders arrived. They searched and found nothing. The employees were cleared to go back inside; most of the customers had finished their meals outside and went on about their evenings. Beagle didn’t charge anybody for their interrupted meal. All of it was on the Hut and he was probably handing out coupons, too. I went back inside and turned on the ovens and started remaking pizzas. The interrupted ones, partially cooked and set aside for half an hour, were thrown away.
That Pizza Hut was probably the busiest restaurant in town at that time. We talked about it and figured it was likely one of the competitors trying to give a shock to our system. There were at least two other pizza places nearby, but they didn’t do nearly as much business as the Pizza Hut and a large part of that was because of Beagle’s management. And his best traits were exhibited during the bomb scare. He quickly determined the threats: time and gas ovens. He took quick and calm action to get the ovens off and the customers outside. As a teen in my first job, I was impressed.
Beagle was a role model for a lot of the teens who worked at that location. It was the mid-1970s. He was a hippie with anger issues. He had a big handlebar mustache and didn’t take much crap from whiny customers. “The customer is always right,” was a sentiment, not the reality. Beagle was taciturn, maybe even brooding. No matter how busy we got, he was able to keep it all running smoothly. And the women extended him a lot of invitations. I never saw him harassing any of the waitresses. If he was dating any of them, he kept it to himself.
Two weeks after that bomb threat, another Friday night I’m working, another phone call I take, another bomb threat. Beagle was off and our assistant manager, Elton, was working.
Elton was loud, brash and theatrical. He was more fun than Beagle. We drove to Little Rock one morning about three a.m. after a particularly rough night at the Hut. There were no 24-hour diners in our area, the closest was in Little Rock. Elton had a big old Mercury sedan that had a reverse angle rear window with powered operation. Push a button on the dash and the rear window went down into the trunk. I’d never seen anything like it. One of the girls who came along on this trip wasn’t a Pizza Hut employee, but an old college friend of Elton’s. He told us that one of her breasts was noticeably bigger than the other and everybody was trying to digest that when she offered to show us starving teenagers her boobs. It was true!
Back to the second bomb scare. I held the phone aloft and said, “Elton! Phone call!” He took the call, but reacted differently than Beagle. He directed the head waitress to call the police. He stood at the cash register, clapped his hands over his head, and yelled, “Everybody! We just had a bomb threat and we need to leave immediately, but I need you to line up here to pay before exiting, please!”
This caused a panic amongst both employees and customers. I have to give him credit though. I never saw anybody work that register faster. As a veteran of the previous bomb scare, I knew my role. I didn’t need to inform the employees; Elton’s yelling took care of that. I moved on to pulling pizzas out of the oven, putting them on top to cool. Then I started to turn off the ovens and Elton asked, “What are you doing?” A quick argument ensued; he didn’t care what Beagle had done. I was told to stay at my post, ovens on, and “cook those damned pizzas!” His concerns were primarily the evening’s income.
Very quickly, everybody was paid up and gone, including Elton. I was alone in the building with the pizzas and the (possible) bomb. I didn’t have any premonition of disaster, but was wondering why in the hell I was the only person in the building when Beagle had handled the previous incident differently and better.
With those ovens, one reached in with a pair of Channel-lock pliers and grabbed the edge of the hot pan in which the pizza was cooking. The pizzas were moved around inside the ovens and pulled out using the pliers. The pizza-cutter wheel popped any bubbles in the cooking dough before they ruined the surface of the pie. So I was moving around pizzas and wheeling away the bubbles when the firemen arrived. The first one to run in asked, “What the hell are you doing here?”
I started to explain and he stopped me. “Get out of here now!” I turned to pull the pizzas out and he grabbed my arm shouting, “Now!”
I was pushed out the door and 10 pizzas were left in the big Blodgett ovens, each cooking away at a very hot but perfectly normal 550° Fahrenheit. Those pizzas burnt to a crisp, black Frisbees, while the cops and the firemen searched for the nonexistent bomb. I thought the pizzas would smoke more as they blackened, but they didn’t. The kitchen smelled like char for days.
And that was the end of the bomb scares. Beagle moved on to greener pastures. The story was that he woke up in a pasture in Montana with his black VW Beetle upside down and 100 feet away. Elton moved on, too, but I never heard any details. I worked under a few more managers at that pizza place and others and I’ve thought about what each of them might do in a bomb scare. I expect they’d react and respond as their personality dictated.