Hard Work Equals Opportunity

As flattered as she was on Monday to be cited as a success by House Speaker Newt Gingrich before a roomful of well-wishers and reporters in a Capitol meeting room, Isabelle “Boots” Wright kept wanting to ask a question:

“What about my husband?” she wanted to interject. “I couldn’t have done it without him.”

She wishes that strangers who applauded her for having risen from “salad girl” to head luncheon chef at a successful Silver Spring restaurant - while putting three children through college - knew how much her late husband, William, a taxi driver and gas company employee, contributed.

But she said nothing. Like most well-bred 70-year-old ladies, Wright is reluctant to appear ungrateful when folks are trying to be kind.

The event was a news conference for the National Restaurant Association to announce a food service industry pledge to hire and train welfare recipients.

Its point - that restaurant work is unfairly perceived as unworthy - was well taken. Association President Herman Cain said such work is dismissed as “low-wage, dead-end, hamburger-flipping, pizza-swinging jobs.” Cain, a former dishwasher who’s now president and chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, said 60 percent of restaurant owners started at entry level.

Certainly Wright sets a wonderful example. The idea of any company’s youngest, lowest-paid employee rising over the years to prominence - and paying for college for three children - is appealing.

Wright just wants you to know she didn’t do it all by herself.

She’s old-fashioned that way. That’s how she raised her children - “strict, like my parents raised me” - and how she views the working world.

Wright chatted on a recent weekday before preparing the day’s pot roast at Mrs. K’s Toll House, an American cuisine restaurant in a century-old stone Tudor.

Despite being used by Republican icon Gingrich as an example of how far anyone can go without welfare (Wright never finished high school) she’s a registered Democrat who hasn’t voted Republican since going for Eisenhower. “When the Republicans were in there, I had to work at Mrs. K’s,” she says. “When the Democrats were in there, I had to work at Mrs. K’s.”

But she and the news conference architects are in accord when it comes to the current welfare system.

“Young people get mad at you for saying this,” she begins, a bit gingerly. Wright, it seems, hates to offend.

“But sometimes I’m in line at the grocery store, and all these young people with food stamps are buying these beautiful pieces of meat. And I have to pick over mine. … I disapprove of that. … I’m almost 71 years old, and I still have to work.”

She pauses. “Actually, I don’t have to.” Gesturing at the restaurant’s antique-filled sitting room, she says, “This is my life. Coming here is like coming home.”

Her story is similar to that of many hard-working older women. Wright grew up poor, she says, “like everyone else,” in Virginia’s rural Caroline County. When her aunt, Dorothy Morris, a nowretired baker at Mrs. K’s, offered in 1940 for 16-year-old Isabelle to move to Washington to work with her, the teenager jumped at the chance.

She moved in with her aunt and worked hard. Two years later, the self-described “little ol’ country girl” met William Wright, whose shiny, black Ford, good family and religious ways made her quickly decide, “This is what I want.” A year later, they married.

In the meantime, she was impressing her bosses, who promoted her to busgirl to baker to cook. Today, manager Paula Kreuzburg, greatgranddaughter of the original owner, who hired Wright, describes her as “a dream. … She has no classical training, but I would put her up against any chef.”

Wright loves her work, her children - who work for the U.S. Army, Bell Atlantic and the U.S. Postal Service - and even, since her husband’s death in 1989, her independence. “I always wanted to do things on my own.”

Ask her about that segment of today’s youth who seem unable to stand on their own and she sighs. “I think today’s children - maybe they get too much. You have to need things, to push yourself. To know there’s no other way to get it besides work.”

Suddenly, she’s unconcerned about what anyone will think.

“It makes me angry. Because these kids now have the opportunity to make big money. To get an education, which I wanted to do but couldn’t because there was no money. And kids don’t want to go” to school.

For Wright, fresh from being honored on Capitol Hill for a lifetime’s effort, the whole thing’s simple. Hard work equals opportunity, whoever is in power.

“All I ever wanted is to have a job,” she says. “For my children to have a job. And I don’t care who gives it to them.”

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