Daughters of Men by Rachel Vassel

Author:Rachel Vassel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Kathy Johnson

Kathy Johnson is president of the National Association for Multi-ethnicity in Communications (NAMIC), an organization that advocates for the cause of diversity in the telecommunications industry. As president, Johnson oversees the daily operations of NAMIC and its seventeen chapters nationwide. Her father, Ken Johnson, was a chef who died in 1989.

Cooking Up Life’s Lessons

My most vivid memory of my father is of him teaching me to ride my bike. He was very athletic, so he always had me riding a bike, going swimming, going to the tennis court—anything to keep me active. He also taught me how to play chess.

My father was a chef. When I was a young kid, he headed up food services for the local YMCA. In later years he taught culinary arts at a local community college, and he had his own catering business as well. My father was one of those people who felt that if you weren’t working, being useful and productive, you were just taking up space.

He began cooking when he took home economics in high school. Dad was the only boy in his class! When he graduated from high school, he moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where I grew up. My father was very intelligent—he skipped two grades and graduated from high school at fifteen—but he simply didn’t have the money to go to college. He started working right out of high school and was very independent from an early age. He enjoyed catering because it allowed him to be self-reliant, to generate income without relying upon others. Also, catering combined his two loves, cooking and entertaining, so it was the best of both worlds.

Mostly my father catered private parties and corporate functions—typically for white people. He was pretty much a one-man show, although he often hired extra people to help out with the serving, and he’d sometimes stay to provide bartending services. One thing about my dad is that if he met you six months ago at a party and you said you were having a vodka tonic, when he saw you six months later he would say, “Mrs. Smith, are you having a vodka tonic tonight?” Since he had a photographic memory, he remembered people’s names, faces, what they drank. People really liked that about him. Sometimes when he would tell a client that he was sending someone else to work their party, they’d say, “Oh, no, we want you!” He had such a great personality.

My father was very jovial—a jokester I would say. When I was in high school, I worked in the grocery store and my dad came in one day. He went over to a woman I worked with who didn’t know he was my dad. She was white, and I was the only black cashier working at the store at the time. He said, “You let that girl work here?” and he started complaining about me. The woman got really upset because he kept going on and on. Finally, he said, “That’s my daughter,” and she was so relieved! He always had a good time.

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