Who remembers when hospitals fed their employees three meals a day?  Those working in the forties and fifties or before enjoyed this privilege .  The principle reason being that no one left his or her duties except to eat.  The hospital schedules ran 7-3,  3-11,  11-7 and personnel ate on duty hours.

Those were enjoyable times.  It was before Medicare and bureaucracy gobbled up the medical profession.  Patients were treated with respect.  They were most often not asked how they expected to pay.  If they could not pay all of the bill when they left, they paid a little at a time until the debt was paid.

I first worked at The Rex Hospital in Raleigh, NC before the present hospital was built.  About once a week we had grilled steak for lunch.  Everyone looked forward to steak day.  When I came to The McPherson EENT Hospital in the fifties, the hospital and staff were much smaller.  The personnel and staff ate family style at a long table seating about 12-14 persons.  The table reminded me of my grandfather's( he had ten children.)  McPherson Hospital had a superb head cook named Mary.  She cooked homemade biscuits every meal and large bowls of vegetables and meat were passed around the table.  Each person ate as many helpings as he wanted.  For breakfast we had eggs,meat,grits,biscuits, coffee and even molasses if one liked.

Hospital by hospital, the practice of meals being a benefit gradually disappeared as employees began to insist on more retirement and medical benefits.  I know, however, that along with free meals went a family love that the employers, the patients and the employees felt for one another.