September 25, 2019
By KEITH RYAN CARTWRIGHT
Rutherford County Schools
Over the past 80 years there have only been two cafeteria managers at Eagleville School.
Karen Goins has been in the cafeteria for the past 40 years. In the fall of 1979, she replaced Stella Holton, who had also been at the school since the mid to late 1930s.
Goins was hired by then principal Joe Shelton and has since worked under five principals, including Stella’s niece Rhonda Holton, who preceded current principal Bill Tollett.
Goins, who was born in Arkansas and moved to Nolensville, Tennessee, when she was 14, had previously worked for Williamson County Schools, where she made $2.25 an hour, and took the job when Shelton told her she would make $4.06 an hour.
In her job interview, Shelton had only four questions for her.
He wanted to know if Goins had a driver’s license, whether she was a high school graduate, he wanted to know if she knew how to cook beans and macaroni, and he wanted to know if she smoked. She did not. Goins later asked Shelton if he would have hired her had she been a smoker. He would not have, she said.
“He didn’t believe in women smoking,” Goins recalled.
Ironic considering Shelton interviewed Goins in a tobacco field down the road from the high school.
Goins recently spoke with Rutherford County Schools’ communications department about her career at Eagleville.
RCS:What was the cafeteria like 42 years ago?
KG:Well, for instance, you had one meat, two vegetables, a fruit and ... you had a dessert every day. I was the dessert lady. I made the cookies and the peach cobblers and all of that kind of stuff. Homemade cinnamon rolls. If a kid didn't have lunch money, you didn't worry about it. It would get paid some way. And we weren't centralized, so this was like your restaurant and you ran it the way that you wanted to run it. When I came here, there was no chocolate milk. They only had plain white milk, so I had the milkman to bring chocolate milk. Well, all the kids loved me. It wasn't two percent chocolate. It was pure chocolate.
RCS:On day one, could you have imagined that 40 years later you would still be here?
KG:No. When I came in, they didn't have potholders. They had brooms that were nubs. They boiled water until it turned white to make jello. I just couldn't believe people cooked like that. Because in Williamson County, we had money even though we didn't make much. But I was only a worker there. I wasn't a manager. If we wanted to buy 100 brooms, we bought 100 brooms. Here … you had to be very careful with what you bought.
RCS:The cafeteria is one of the rare places in a school that every day you deal with everybody in this building. At some point, everyone has to eat.
KG:I do miss being able to be out there on the lines all the time. I used to run a line, but now there's so much work to do. There's no way you can run a line and do all the work that I have to go through. ... We have state (regulations) and ... we do have a production sheet that I think is just, you know, the ladies write everything down. Then you got to type it in and it's repetitious. I love to feed people. I love to cook. I bring food up (to the Central Office) at Christmas and whenever Bill (Spurlock) hosts an event there — principal meetings or whatever.
RCS:You have worked under five principals, how are they different?
KG:Okay. Mr. Shelton was a tightwad. He didn't want you to spend nothing for nothing. We would go to Smyrna Air Force base and get equipment. I mean, I went and got a potato peeler from them. The second principal, the one that got killed, of course, he wasn't here long, he was military. He didn't even get a high school education, but he got a diploma in the military and then went to college. He came in as the one that was going to change the whole school's concept. I don't think he really understood the closeness that we had. Then the third principal, he went to school here. He graduated from here, so he treated you better. Then Ms. Holton, she was just my best friend in the whole world. When she got sick, she planned out her own funeral and she said, me and my sister were to be in the front row. As soon as they were done we were to go over to her house and we had food fixed. She had it down. She was one that came in here and brought every person — the staff — a Christmas present the first year she worked here. If kids didn't have their light bill paid, we would get together and pay the light bills and she was like that.
RCS:I am sorry about the loss. I am sure that was difficult, but what about Bill (Tollett)?
KG:Tollett, because he came when he was 25, he's my baby and he's my boss. He is my boss, but I don't think of him as my boss. I go up and I hug him just like I do Mr. Spurlock. I'm a hugger. I love this school. It's my life and I'm not ready to quit.
PHOTO / BILL TOLLETT