A file made of other people
The two dossiers built before this one were a man's own papers: what Hubert Eickman and Claude Sedenquist kept, pasted down and handed over. This one is not. Unit U-SIR is a memorial volume, made after its subject was dead, out of what other people were willing to write down about him.1
The chain of custody is on the colophon page in Darrell Anderson's own words: the book was "Researched, and Compiled by Darrell Anderson for the Academy of Chefs and was Presented by our Chairman Jim Douglas, to Trudy Sir on July 10, 1995." Photographs and signatures were taken at the event, an updated copy was presented again on 11 September, and two identical copies went to the Washington State Chefs Association "to be added to the History of our Culinary Apprenticeship going back to 1963".2 This unit is one of those copies.
That origin is the file's great strength and its one large hole. Nine weeks after his funeral, forty-odd people who had trained under him sat down and wrote what they remembered, which is why we know what he taught on a Tuesday evening in 1975 and what he said when the work ran long. Nobody thought to write down where he came from.
What the file does not contain
He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1925 and appears in Seattle, fully formed and about forty, in the middle 1960s.34 Between those two facts there is nothing. Not a naturalisation date, not a ship, not a school, not a first job in America.
He talked about it, though — at least once. An apprentice remembered him lecturing Hyatt House management trainees on how a hotel kitchen related to the rest of the hotel, and spending most of it on the apprenticeship he had come through himself. The same account records, carefully, that Sir "was not Swiss" while praising the Swiss system and the way Switzerland treated hospitality as a national industry.5 Somebody in that room had assumed he was, and he corrected them. It is the only glimpse of his own training in 257 frames.
The only document that gives a birthplace is the card printed for his funeral: Zlabek, Czechoslovakia.6 The spelling is an American printer's, and the Czech form of the name has not been established.
The programme he walked into
Anderson's own typescript sets out where the apprenticeship came from, and Sir is not in it. The officers of the chefs' association began meeting on the feasibility of culinary apprenticeship after the 1963 national convention — held that September in Seattle, at the Olympic.8 In 1964 they met Walter Roth, executive chef of the Olympic Hotel, and patterned the scheme on his in-house programme. Industry leaders including Victor Rosellini were brought in. A bona-fide programme ran from 1969 as a joint effort with the cooks' union, Local 33, and on 17 July 1970 the state recognised and registered it as the Seattle Culinary Joint Apprenticeship Committee.7
Sir joined the chefs' association in the mid-1960s,94 just as this was being built. He spent the rest of his life inside it.
Hotels, 1967–1979
The first dated event of his career anywhere in the file is an Escoffier dinner at the Hyatt House on 2 May 1967; he hosted another there on 4 November 1968.4 By 1973 he was Chef de Cuisine of the Washington Athletic Club, hosting the Sixth Annual Academy of Chefs Dinner there on 13 October and an Escoffier dinner a fortnight later. He held office in the Escoffier Society through those years — Le Comité de la Bonne Bouche in 1969, Le Comité Permanent in 1970 and 1971, secretary in 1975.4
By March 1979 he had moved to the Rainier Golf and Country Club as executive chef, and the apprenticeship school met in the club.12 Anderson's column that month describes the apprentices planning and cooking a formal dinner for the visiting national apprenticeship director, with a detail no other frame supplies: Sir's daughter Elaine served at it, and a young man named Bill Taylor is called "Joe's personal apprentice".1011
Twenty years of Tuesday evenings
The teaching is what the file is actually about, and three independent figures fix when it started. The Academy's 1995 summary gives twenty years, ending with his retirement in 1991.4 A newspaper feature quotes him saying that in the five years he had taught, fifteen had graduated.14 The earliest apprentice to write a tribute dates his own class to 1974.13 All three point at about 1971.
The class met on Tuesday evenings, five to nine, a minimum of 144 hours a year, and apprentices attended on their own time after a full day in a kitchen.15 He had twelve apprentices at one point in the middle 1970s, all men.14 Roughly twenty-five students at a time passed through over the programme's life.16 He taught from the textbook of Eugene Pauli, with Chef Reiner Greubel taking the practical half.17
What that classroom was like survives in unusual detail, because forty people were asked to describe it at once:
THAT FIRST EVENING WE MADE SPAGHETTI BOLOGNESE. I NEVER HEARD OF MAKING A SPAGHETTI SAUCE BY USING BRUNOISE OF SIRLOIN (WHATEVER THAT WAS), OR USING GRAND JUS AND DEMIGLAZE WITH TOMATO CONCASSE, AND NEVER RINSE PASTA, AND NEVER COOK TOMATO IN AN ALUMINUM POT.
That is John Melchior, who walked in as an Ivar's dinner cook in the spring of 1975 and found the apprentices "filing in showing their respects for the chef".18 Grades were earned by oral testing, and students earned nicknames from their mistakes — David Estes was "Mr. Sachet Bag" for the rest of his career, after putting a sachet of herbs into a cream soup that did not need one.13 Kevin Roscoe, who would carve the ice at Sir's memorial reception, chose two words: "proud and passionate," and remembered the humour that "would always catch the newer students off guard".19
The dominant note across all of it is work. Estes several times helped at evening functions at the Rainier club and watched Sir, after a twelve-hour day, reverse his apron and start again.13 Paul Hudson recorded the line Sir used when the work got hard — "it is only work, it happens in the best of families" — and noted that praise came rarely and therefore meant something.20
He was also, by every account that mentions it, extremely fit. Anderson called him "Mr. Health" and described him at sixty-nine still working, running the Rainier golf course and skiing at Crystal Mountain.21 The association's president wrote of "his skiing, which I might add, gave anyone who skied with him a run for their money".22
The committee man
Teaching was half of it. He sat on the Seattle Culinary Joint Apprenticeship Committee for years, with Anderson, Carl Borg and Tony Ruegg,23 and he was still on it in April 1993 — two years after leaving the classroom, two years before his death — as one of two employee representatives, selected by Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local Union #8.24
He was in the American Academy of Chefs by the time of its Eleventh Annual Dinner in November 1977,27 hosted its annual dinners at the Rainier club in 1986 and 1989,9 and chaired the Washington chapter in 1994.25 The 1989 programme lists the whole Washington membership, Hubert Eickman among them.26
Set beside the tributes, the trade press is a useful corrective. Asked about the profession he sounds less like a mentor and more like a man running a supply problem: there was a shortage of chefs nationally, he had statistics showing 17,000 culinary positions open, and the Washington programme was "by far the most successful" for one reason — "management and labor had joined to make it work".14 On his own teaching he was flat: all he could do at the school was teach the basics, and they learned to build on those working with a chef in a kitchen.
1994–1995
He led the Academy's dinner in 1994. Writing afterwards, the association's president said that Sir's health "may have been in question" that night, but his commitment to finishing the job was not.22
He died on 6 June 1995 and was buried on the 10th from the New Apostolic Church on SW 106th, Rev. Bert Woll officiating. The six pallbearers were Randy Peasley, Paul Hudson, Roger Babel, George Rowe, David Estes and Kevin Rosco — every one of them a man he had taught.6
Hubert Eickman had died nine weeks earlier. On the Academy's letterhead that summer the two names sit together under In Memoriam28 — the man who taught Darrell Anderson, and the man who taught Anderson's apprentices.
On 10 July, a month after the funeral, the Academy held "A Salute to Culinary Apprenticeship and A Tribute to Josef 'Joe' Sir" at the SeaTac Occupational Skills Center. The host chef was Dave Estes — Mr. Sachet Bag, apprentice of 1974–77, by then the centre's vice principal.29 Roscoe carved the ice. Anderson had written round the city's kitchens asking for former apprentices "going back many Years," each to send a résumé and "another page or at least a Paragraph telling how the Culinary Apprenticeship, and Chef Sir played a part in it".30 What came back is B20-1151–B20-1565. The profits went to the association's Building Fund in his name.
What is not settled
Where the classroom actually was. The Academy names Seattle Central Community College and the press agrees;414 one apprentice's résumé puts the 1985 apprenticeship at the Westin Hotel;17 Anderson's 1979 column has the school meeting at the Rainier club.12 Most likely a class that met wherever its instructor was working, over twenty years. No frame sets out the sequence.
Trudy. The book was made for Trudy Sir. Bound into it are the complete apprenticeship papers of Trudy Jeannette Baever — Washington Plaza Hotel from November 1975, apprenticeship completed 1976–78, a 1978–79 exchange year at the Hotel Scandinavia in Oslo and in Switzerland, silver at the association's culinary exhibit for cold meats,31 and a newspaper feature calling her a first in the state's apprenticeship — in which Sir is quoted saying she "was an inspiration to the rest of the class" B20-1331–B20-1355.15 Nothing anywhere states that the apprentice and the widow are the same woman. The inference is obvious and it is still an inference. One question to Trudy Sir, asked through the WSCA, settles it.
Who came first. One contributor says he was admitted to Sir's kitchen against Sir's will and became his first apprentice.5 No second document supports it.
Josef Sir has no photograph in this file. Two group portraits survive3233 and nobody has identified the faces.