Service with smile never out of style

Jackie Ogle’s service to humanity began one afternoon while she was bowling a frame.

The manager of the Spokane’s North Bowl restaurant casually mentioned she needed a waitress. Would Jackie help her out of a jam and perhaps work a few shifts?

Sure, said Jackie. Why not?

Little did she know that she had embarked on a career that would stretch 37 or 38 years.

Or longer. Jackie is a little cloudy as to the exact year she started catering to the needs of diners and flipping burgers and making homemade soups inside the landmark bowling center on the corner of Normandie and Sinto.

It might’ve been 1964, she said, which would make her run there an even 40 years.

The beginning really doesn’t matter to the management and customers at North Bowl. What matters is next Friday.

On that day, Jackie will call it quits. “I’m old enough to get Social Security, and I want to use some of it,” explains the 62-year-old.

For North Bowl, Jackie’s departure marks the end of an era.

“She’s the hardest employee in the world to replace,” says North Bowl owner Dick Hoering. “I don’t think she’s ever missed a day of work. She does everything. She’s fast. She’s wonderful.

“I don’t think she ever gets tired. She talks young. She thinks young. She acts young. She’s lovely. I think she knows half the workers who work for the city. If they come in here once she knows their name.”

The Jackie Ogles of the world don’t get golden parachutes or solid gold watches when they retire. But she can be proud of being a role model to all those who earn a paycheck in the mostly thankless food service industry.

Gregarious and attentive, Jackie dotes on her customers. She keeps a mental inventory of her regulars’ preferences right down to the salad dressing, says Donna Kerst, North Bowl’s day manager. “The personal service she gives them is wonderful.”

The old-fashioned, folksy approach is a good fit inside retro North Bowl.

Hoering has kept his bowling center from bowing to the trendy whims of décor change.

If you ask me, North Bowl looks exactly the way a bowling alley should look.

It still has those curved blue fiberglass benches that were in vogue when I bowled as a kid 40-some years ago. You know – the ones with the built-in aluminum cup holders and ash trays.

The Brunswick ball returns were cutting-edge back when a guy named Weber was a bowling star. That’s Dick Weber, not his son, Pete.

Worn beige and blue linoleum still covers the floor. A large plastic 7-Up clock from the Uncola days hangs from a wall.

North Bowl is unintentionally very cool.

The other day, Jackie sat at one of the restaurant’s tables and talked about some of her most memorable moments.

Like her biggest tip. It was 50 bucks, she says, and came from a bowler who had once hit the Lotto.

Jackie figures she’s only had five or six real stinkers as customers over the years. She doesn’t call them stinkers. She prefers the vulgar expression used to describe that orifice attached to the alimentary canal.

These are the people, she adds, who make you feel “like you’re not quite as good as they are.”

Jackie’s weapon is to “kill them with kindness.” Sometimes it works.

One older woman, she says, was about as crotchety as it gets. The woman never smiled or had a pleasant thing to say.

But Jackie and her co-workers went out of their way to treat this grouch like the Queen of England. Sure enough, the sourpuss attitude faded. “She came around,” says Jackie, “but it took months.”

Jackie’s worst moment made the newspaper in October 1995. She was walking home from North Bowl with her son, John Hintz, when a group of teenagers approached. One of the punks hit the 35-year-old cement mason in the head. Hintz went down, striking his head on the sidewalk. Jackie ran for help.

The beating put Hintz in a coma for 14 days. Extensive rehabilitation followed. Her son made an impressive recovery, but still suffers some effects. The punks were prosecuted and punished. In Jackie’s eyes, however, they got a slap on the wrist.

Despite what happened, there is no trace of bitterness. She remains quick with a laugh and even quicker with a smile.

Her funniest memory? Jackie’s face lights up.

One day one of the bowlers fell, she says. The man looked seriously sick. Paramedics were called. They bundled him onto a stretcher and were getting ready to cart him to a hospital.

Someone went to get the man’s wife, who was still rolling balls down on one of the lanes. “I can’t go with him,” she said. “Tell them I’ll be up there when I’m done bowling.”

Jackie Ogle laughs. “Now that’s a true bowler.”