Longest-tenured waitress at Wichita’s longest-tenured restaurant retiring after 45 years
The original NuWay Cafe at 1416 W. Douglas has a dedicated crowd of regular customers, and many of them stop in weekly for crumbly burgers, root beer floats and legendary onion rings.
Many of them, though, also stop in just to soak up the playful aura of Betty Gettings, the quick-moving, wise-cracking 78-year-old waitress who has worked at NuWay since 1977 and has been a fixture at the restaurant on Douglas since 1979.
This week, the Douglas restaurant has been particularly crowded with Gettings’ fan club as word has started to spread that she’s retiring. On Thursday, she’ll hang up the Betty Boop apron a customer embroidered for her years ago.
She was planning to work until she was 80, Gettings said, but her children, grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) have been urging her to slow down, and she wants to spend more time with her family, she said.
Although she’s asked NuWay not to throw her a retirement party, people have been streaming in nonstop over the past week to say goodbye to one of Wichita’s most legendary, longest-tenured waitresses.
“Thursday’s going to be a rough day for me,” she said. “I love my customers. They’re like my second family.
“But I just want to ride off into the sunset like Roy Rogers.”
Dishing it out
Gettings was 33 years old when she started at NuWay, she said.
She always knew she liked food service. Her first ever job was at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Wichita. Later, having abandoned jobs as a nurse’s aide — “too depressing” — and as a medical secretary — “You just sit in the same office all day with the same women” — Gettings decided to return to what she liked best.
She was working as a waitress at a restaurant called Yankee Clipper in south Wichita when her manager accepted a job at NuWay and asked her if she’d like to join him.
“I said, ‘What is NuWay?” Gettings said. “And he goes, ‘Oh, you’re going to love it.’”
Gettings quit her job only to learn that her manager had had a change of heart and was going to work as a highway patrolman instead. But she was committed, she said, so off to NuWay she went. At the time, the famous loose-meat sandwiches cost 70 cents apiece. Today, they’re $4.39.
The company trained her for six months then appointed her as assistant manager of the NuWay on East Harry. Two years later, the manager of the original store on West Douglas quit, and the owners asked Gettings to take over.
She’s been there ever since.
Gettings ran the Douglas restaurant until 2009, when she decided she wanted to scale back and work as a waitress. For the past few years, she’s worked only about 12 hours a week.
But over the three decades she was in charge, Gettings was the force behind many big changes at the original store, which first opened in 1930 and is Wichita’s oldest continually running restaurant.
Owner Neal Stong tended to want to keep the original as original as possible, but Gettings was the one who persuaded him to add fries to the menu on West Douglas, years after they’d been added at other NuWay restaurants around town. She also convinced him in the mid-1990s to go ahead with the addition of another dining room on the historic building’s west side.
Gettings also has the strongest connection to NuWay’s original owners, the late Tom and Helen McEvoy. Gettings was trained by Helen McEvoy’s sister. And though she never got to work with Helen, who died in 1989, Gettings met her and heard through the grapevine that she approved of the job she was doing. (Gettings is also the only NuWay employee who can still do “the Nu-Way flip,” a method Helen used to construct NuWay sandwiches that she insisted her employees learn.)
Over the years, NuWay history has become one of Gettings’ passions. In the 1980s, she started a scrapbook that today is at least eight inches thick and is stuffed with old menus, mementos and photos, including black-and-white photos of Helen McEvoy cooking in the tiny Nu-Way kitchen.
Restaurant work has always fit her outgoing personality, Gettings said, and it’s what she does best.
She loves “dishing it out” to her customers and loves it more when they dish it right back.
At home, she has photos of some of her longtime customers, who have become longtime friends, hanging on her refrigerator. One of them shows Gettings holding a toddler who’s visiting the restaurant. Right next to it is a photo of that toddler grown into a 15-year-old boy and towering over her.
When Gettings’ grandchildren ask her who’s in the photos, she tells them they are her adopted grandchildren.
“I know that there’s more money out there,” she said. “Everybody always kind of puts down food service. It’s like, ‘Oh, it should be a high school job that you just work until you get out of high school. But...it’s in my blood, you know?”
A new chapter
Gettings has been saying farewell to her longtime customers for the past week — and hugging them as they go. She admits it’s hard knowing she might never see some of them again.
On Tuesday, longtime customer Douglas Winkley stopped in and after engaging in several minutes of good-natured trash talking with Gettings, he learned that her last day was approaching.
He told her he’d miss her.
“She’s a fixture here, and she has a great sense of humor,” he said. “Besides, she’s a darn good waitress. It’s kind of old school to have a great sense of humor and also know how to take care of people.”
Gettings said she’s not sure she’ll stop into NuWay very often after Thursday because she has big plans. She wants to join the YMCA. She wants to dance more. She wants to take her four great-grandchildren to Exploration Place.
She also wants to see her friends more often, including her former co-worker and another longtime NuWay waitress, Pat Jones.
Angel Ouellete, who succeeded Gettings as manager at the Douglas NuWay, says Gettings is like a mother to her. The two have been working together for almost 13 years, and Ouellete said she’s always admired the easy way Gettings has with customers and her ability to “roll with every punch.”
She predicts leaving NuWay behind will be hard for her friend.
“I think she’ll probably wake up the first few mornings thinking she needs to be here,” Ouellete said.
But Gettings said she’s ready to go. Although she might have to come back for visits with her grandkids, who she says are addicted to NuWay’s food, it’s time to start a new chapter.
“When God opens a door, you just go and go through it and see what’s on the other side of the door,” she said.
This story was originally published March 30, 2022 at 1:28 PM.
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