TOMORROW!
Party in the Underground
10 p.m.
Saturday, Feb. 22
A.B.C themed
Feb. 21, 2014
Rumors soar amidst
kitchen staff controversy
By Burton Hodges
Opinion Editor
D ave Taylor, director of Pioneer Food
Services at Brevard College, began
receiving text messages from Dr. Joyce
and Dr. D’Anna around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday
night, wondering why Darlene Blackstock
had been fired that morning. The texts came
as a surprise to Taylor, as he was the one
who did the firing at Pioneer and he was five
hours away on a business trip in northern
Kentucky.
According to Donald Meintz, who was the
in charge of cafeteria operations on Tuesday
morning, “Darlene had been rude to some
students and [Pioneer] staff at breakfast and
been asked to go home for the rest of Tuesday
and all of Wednesday.”
A member of the Brevard College
community for five years, Darlene had
become something of a campus legend to the
many students who frequent Myers Dining
Hall each day, and the rumors of her firing
began to circulate around campus like the flu.
• ••
Around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, I was invited
along with 163 other students to join a
Facebook group, organizing a protest outside
of the cafeteria at 9 p.m. Surprised, I walked
over to the dining hall to see if I could get any
sort of scoop on what had happened to her.
No one around the dining hall seemed
to know what was going on, but they also
seemed to think that Darlene had been fired
and asked me if I could get in touch with her
for them.
Students began to converge on the patio of
the dining hall around 8:45, and by 9 p.m.
there were at least 40 students gathered to
cover the entrance to cafeteria in chalk. None
of the students seemed to know exactly what
had happened, except that Darlene had been
yelling at students in line to get food and was
fired on the spot.
“She had been telling us for a long time that
she was expecting to get fired,” one student
told me. “They have slowly been firing all of
the old kitchen staff.”
Caleb Wellborn, who had organized the
event on Facebook, said that Darlene had told
him over text message that morning that she
had been fired.
After a proper chalking, and plenty of
“Darlene or bust” and “We want Darlene’s”
had been inscribed into the face of Myers
Dining Hall, the protesters gathered atop the
picnic benches for a photo shoot. I stood in the
back, taking in the scenery when my phone
began to vibrate.
Darlene had not been fired. The rumors
weren’t true. At least, that’s what the stream
of emails being exchanged between students
and faculty were now saying. 1 looked around.
Several other students were looking at their
phones, confused as well.
“Oops.”
• ••
Dave Taylor arrived on Wednesday morning
to another headache. On the heels of a
catastrophic meltdown with the dishwashing
equipment in January, Pioneer had been
digging themselves out of a financial hole
See 'Pioneer,' page 12
S tudents react with chalk-writing protest Tuesday when rumors spread about the
letting go of a well-known and well-loved member of the Myers Dining Hall staff and
BC community.