Tom Baines gave the Brown Palace Hotel 45 years of loyal service, carrying meals to rooms and waiting tables. You can find Baines’ likeness in a mural near the hotel’s parking garage.
But these days, you can’t find Baines.
That’s because when he could no longer walk well enough to do his job, the hotel gave him walking papers.
Baines’ Oct. 6 “termination” had all the subtlety of chain-saw sculpture.
At times, Baines has literally been the face of a downtown Denver landmark that has served presidents, pop stars and other potentates for more than a century.
Baines’ mug graced a memorable ad marketing the Brown Palace’s traditional elegance. The ad featured a stone-faced, but professional Baines saying, “You want trendy? We’re very trendy. Ike liked trendy.”
Baines actually served President Dwight Eisenhower at the Brown Palace. He served the Beatles, John Wayne and Spike Lee. He served thousands of dinners and drinkers in the Ship Tavern restaurant and bar. Then, earlier this year, a degenerative hip and an arthritic knee forced him to have surgery.
Now 66, Baines didn’t recover in the three months allotted. He may never move well enough to again wait tables.
“I asked if they could give me anything to do three days a week, three hours a day,” said Baines, who has worked part time, 20 hours a week, as a waiter since he went on Social Security. “I could shuffle papers. I could answer phones. I could help seat people at the Tavern.
“They told me they were opening a spa. I said, ‘What about making me a towel boy?”‘
Baines said Patti Sorour, the Brown Palace’s director of human resources, told him the hotel had no jobs Baines could do, so Baines was “terminated.”
“It was cold as death,” Baines said, sitting in his home in southeast Denver. “I was just shocked. I thought they would take care of me like I took care of them. I was terminated like someone caught drinking.”
Sorour said the hotel looked at several jobs for Baines but couldn’t find one he could do based on his desires and physical limitations.
“He was on leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act,” Sorour said. “He’s unable to come back because his doctor hasn’t released him (to do the work he did before).
“I told him his failure to be released to come back under the (leave act) resulted in him being terminated. He wasn’t fired for violating rules.”
As for other jobs, Sorour said:
“We reviewed several positions. We don’t have towel boys. At the Ship Tavern, he wanted to stand there. He couldn’t do host work. He wanted to be an ambassador for the restaurant. We talked about working in the gift shop, but he didn’t want to work weekends.”
That’s not true, Baines and his wife countered angrily. Hotel officials never discussed a less-strenuous job with Baines, they said. They just fired him.
On Monday, after I asked the Brown Palace about Baines’ departure, Baines said he got a conciliatory call from Gary Levine, the hotel’s vice president for food and beverage services. The Brown Palace will consider Baines for a job when he gets his doctor’s release, Sorour added.
Meanwhile, Baines said former co-workers have been told he “retired.”
“I don’t know who said that,” Sorour said, admitting that she, too, has heard rumors of a “going away party” for Baines.
For a spit-and-polish “Remains of the Day” kind of guy whose scrapbook includes a Colorado Waiter of the Year Award, as well as letters of praise from judges and members of Congress, the whole thing has been humiliating.
At this point, Baines isn’t sure he’d take a job at the hotel if one was offered.
“They could take me back just to look good,” Baines said. “I’d be a pathetic puppy with my head bent down. I always looked people in the eye.
“I couldn’t belly crawl. I can’t do that. I won’t do it.”
The saddest part of this saga is that anyone made him think he would have to.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
