Perfect worker — for 61 years
Cecil Exum figures he’s made 130 omelettes by now, but honestly, he’s lost track. It’s five hours into his nine-hour shift and he’s just realized he hasn’t had his morning coffee. The crowds keep coming, asking for omelettes, fried eggs and waffles, so he keeps cooking.
Now three more omelettes are sizzling on the stove. He pats each one with a rubber spatula and flips them, with a slight flick of his wrist: One, two, three.
“For mercy’s sake!” says Sally McGinnis, 58, a longtime customer who’s lingering by the omelette station. “Those flips, my gosh, they were perfect.”
Exum, who will turn 80 shortly, has been cooking for Marriott since before it was called Marriott. He was19 when he left a sharecroppers’ farm in North Carolina to take a job at Hot Shoppes, a root-beer stand run by the Marriott family. He bussed tables, served sodas and made banana splits.
The following year, the Marriotts opened their first hotel, Twin Bridges Motor Hotel in Arlington, Va. Exum, a dishwasher, was among its first employees. He took home $30 (U.S.) a week.
As Exum worked his way up from the kitchen to the front, and then to the corner omelette station at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Virginia, where he has been for 24 years, the business grew, too: From a chain of root-beer stands to the world’s largest hotel chain, with $17 billion in annual revenue.
“Mr. Cecil is a living history of Marriott,” Robert Tate, the hotel’s director of human resources wrote in nominating Exum for a Marriott Award of Excellence earlier this year.
Exum, his managers say, is the company’s longeststanding employee. That puts him in the company of one other guy: Bill Marriott Jr., the hotel giant’s 85year-old chairperson, who also began working there full time in 1956 and retired a few years ago as chief executive.
“We are so proud that Cecil is part of the Marriott family,” Marriott said. “He has been a shining example of ‘putting people first.’ And I can testify he makes wonderful omelettes.”
As a result, Exum has become something of a legend at the sprawling, 697-room convention hotel.
“So many people have heard about him, and they are always stopping to say hello,” said fellow staffer Mohammed Kamalzadh, 64.
Company lore has it that in his 61 years, Exum has never once called in sick.
Each morning, he wakes to gospel music at 3:30 a.m. in his home in Waldorf, Md., where he lives alone. He drives to work, and by 5 a.m., he’s pulling a striped apron over his head.
“To be honest with you, I’m not really an omelette person,” Exum said.
His mother taught him to cook, he said, as soon as he was tall enough to reach the stovetop.
He’s been able to settle into his routine, he said, because Marriott hasn’t pushed him out — and that feels like a luxury these days. The company doesn’t have mandatory retirement requirements and Exum said he’s never felt pressured to leave.
Many days, his job is what keeps him going. When his arthritic knee is bothering him, or when he’s just feeling down, Exum gets dressed and heads to work.
“Pretty soon, I’m making eggs, I’m socializing and I realize my pain has gone away,” he said.