Milton Works
            Because We Do
Interviews and Photographs by Sara Pulit, Mai Ann Healy, and Siobhan Atkins

Joe Jensen
Flik Food Services

I work Sunday through Thursday and my hours are 6 to 2:30. If there’s a function like this past weekend [Graduates’ Weekend], I’m on whenever they need me. So, when I came this past Thursday I worked my regular eight hours and I put in three more. I was here for twelve hours on Friday. Then I was here for six hours on Saturday and here I am back to work again [on Sunday]. It’s a little busy, but that’s every year for Grads’ Weekend.

I do all of the baking for breakfast not just for Forbes but also for breakfast desserts for the two dorms on East Campus, and now West Campus. And I make the bread for the soup station every day. And I bake all of the desserts that are at lunch. It’s a lot.

 I’ve been here since 1992. This is my thirteenth year. I started here about four months after Aramark took over. I was here their full 11 years. And it was kind of odd because one day I was here 11 years with Aramark and the next day I was starting day one with Flik. They grandfathered us in, our vacation time and stuff, and it would have been heck to start all over again. But it was weird because all of a sudden one day you’re working for one guy and the next day there are all these new bosses and all of these new ideas. Switching companies, for us first-timers, was kind of tough because we really didn’t know what was going to happen. Did the new company want us to stay? Were they going to bring in all of their own people?

I get up at 4:30 every morning. Even on my days off I get up at 4:30 or 5 o’clock in the morning. I can’t sleep. I have to leave the house at 5:30 so I can leave here by 6. I only live in Weymouth but I’m not the type of person that can get up and do what you’ve got to do and head out the door. I take my time. I watch the news while I’m getting dressed and see what the weathers like. I don’t want to rush it. I could get up at 5 but I’m in such a routine that now at 5 o’clock I’m in front of the TV with NESN on to see what the score was from the night before.

 I don’t really interact much with the students because I’m downstairs. Except for the third graders. When Mr. Fredie was here, his wife would bring over the third grade class. Every year they’d come down to the bakery. The first couple of years we had these little 6-inch round cakes that I had already frosted and then I made all different color frostings and got all of the pastry bags with the different tips. And the kids would come in and I’d make flowers for them and they’d be able to take the cakes home. And they ask me a bunch of questions about what I do, and they take pictures and the greatest part is that when they go back, they write notes to me. And the kids do it in their own handwriting. They don’t check the spelling and stuff so some of the cards are amazing. One year they sent what looked like a sheet of yellow paper but it was laminated and it was six feet long and the kids drew pictures about things they saw and what they liked best about the bakery. I had mentioned something about vacation and they all told me to have a great vacation. And we actually hung it up on the wall for awhile. Then it was almost near the end, when Aramark was leaving and I don’t know what happened to it. It disappeared. I think it was one of the things that Aramark decided to get rid of.

I started baking back in the ‘70s. I guess you would consider me a dumb kid. I didn’t even think I was going to make it through high school. What happened was I was in junior high school in Braintree, and I was in woodshop. And I was terrible. I couldn’t cut a straight line. And there was a bunch of girls that wanted to do woodshop. And they were stuck in cooking class. So they got a couple of us really bad guys from the woodshop that couldn’t cut anything and asked, “how would you guys like to learn how to cook.” And I thought of it as being a cool thing. And then I realized what was really cool about it was that there were four guys and twenty girls. But I liked it so much that the instructor got me an application for Quincy Vocational and I got accepted and I went into their baking program. I took some course and at the end of my sophomore we were given a choice [between cooking and baking].

My grandmother really influenced my interest in baking. She was a friend of Mrs. Montillio from Montillio’s pastry shop. My grandmother worked for Mrs. Montillio. And I think just watching my grandmother got me interested in baking instead of cooking. Sometimes I think I would have rather done cooking. But I decided to give it a try. When I got out of high school, I spent years at Montillio’s and just about every bakery you can think of on the north and south shore of Boston. And I did all the different doughnut shops first. Then I went into the bakeries. I graduated from Dunwoody in 1976- Mr. Montillio had told me about it and got me to go- and from there, came back home and went right back into Montillio’s. But from there I went to the Marriott. And the chef there took a job at the Union Oyster House in Boston, and about a month later he called me and offered me a job there. And I went there and got the title of “Pastry Chef.” I was a glorified baker, and I was there for five years. I just got tired of the commute, taking the train or trying to find parking spaces in Boston. Then I saw the ad for this place and I’ve been here ever since.



I’ll be fifty in October. It’s a scary thing to think of fifty. It really scares me. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because I’m around these kids all day and I think about how they have their whole future ahead of them. And I’ve got maybe another 15 years before I retire. That’s kind of scary. We all know that eventually we’re going to die and I’m closer to death than I am to being born. The only thing is, see, I had to put my mother in a nursing home. She had Alzheimer’s. And, I know what nursing homes are like now. And I also know that Alzheimer’s is hereditary. And my grandfather, my mother’s father, had some kind of dementia. He used to wander away. He’d wander away and we’d have to go look for him. But they really never knew what it was because he ended up dying of a heart attack so they didn’t really check. And then my mother, who was just so damn healthy, this is a woman who would go to the doctor who would say cut back on this type of food and she’d cut it off completely and she’d be walking, drank water, and she was 5’2” and weighed 120 pounds. And she was so healthy, and then all of a sudden she started forgetting things. And asking the same thing over and over again. And things started progressing. To think that this could possibly happen to me. Or maybe skip me and hit my brother, I don’t know. Or the next generation. But, I already told my brother that if I find out that I have Alzheimer’s, I actually heard about this pill that you can buy over the counter. If you take enough of them, you just fall asleep. Either that or I’m going to stand in front of a train. But I am not going to go through what she did. It just scares me to think that I’ll end up the way she did. It was pitiful. It really was. It got to the point where she didn’t know who she was, and once she didn’t know who I was. It bothered me that I’d go in and visit her and I’d be there for three hours and I’d leave the room to maybe go to the bathroom. I’d come back and she’d be like, “I haven’t seen you in weeks, where have you been.” She’d be so angry at me. She had already forgot. But then when she forgot who I was, that hurt. That hurt. And then the last ten days of her life were. She was born October 13, 1923 in Italy. She died October 25, 2002. So, she made it to her 80th birthday. But my dad died in 1959. My brother was 5 and I was 3, so my mother was the world to me.

My youngest niece graduated from college yesterday and today they’re having a big party for her, and I missed it because I worked the last two days for the school and I just didn’t think I’d be able to make it today because it’s a five hour drive and I would have had to turn around and come back home tonight because I have to work tomorrow. But I wrote her a letter with her present, and I basically told her that if she’s lucky, the first job she has might be the best one she’ll get, but you know, if it isn’t, find a job that you really love, because the worst thing in life is to go to work everyday and hate it. I mean I look forward to coming to work. There are days when I hate being here but I love my job. I hate the fact that I’m standing up on a hard floor all day in a very hot bakery with a lot of last minute orders, but I know nothing else and I really love it. I basically told her, you spend most of your life at work so you better like it.