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Not your average Joe
The Busy Bee honors its most loyal customer on his 100th birthday

By Eric McHenry

It’s 3 p.m. on June 16, and the Busy Bee couldn’t be busier. The narrow corridor between the counter and the vinyl-upholstered booths is abuzz with activity. Waitresses, calling out orders or carrying plates of steaming sea-food, weave through the milling patrons. They’re doing double duty this afternoon — tending to the late lunch crowd and preparing for the day’s special event: Joe Reels is turning 100.

	Joe Reels crosses the red carpet rolled out for his 100th birthday celebration at the Busy Bee. In the background, at left, is the Cadillac limousine that brought him to the restaurant. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Joe has been coming to the little diner, on Beacon Street near BU’s South Campus, for decades; no one knows how many. His patronage predates the institutional memory. “Peter’s owned the Busy Bee for 33 years,” says Dianne, one of the waitresses, “and Joe’s been coming here at least that long.”

Peter Christakis and his staff have done a nice job decorating for the party. Clusters of helium balloons kiss the ceiling. In the front window, beneath the bent neon tube sign that says “A SNACK OR A MEAL,” placards wish Joe a happy 100th.  

“Oh, he’s the best guy,” says one regular.

“He greets everybody so warmly, so affectionately,” another adds. “He’s a giver.”

There’s a commotion at the front of the diner. The crowd parts, making room for an enormous birthday cake, its bottom tier so wide it barely fits through the door. The cake’s arrival creates a clamor, which doubles to a din when a navy-blue stretch Cadillac appears in the window. Joe, who lives not far from the Busy Bee, typically walks to lunch. But not today.

Dressed like a man fresh off the fairway in white slacks, a lemon-yellow polo shirt, and a cardigan, Joe gets a celebrity’s greeting when he emerges from the limousine. A line of well-wishers forms, headed by Peter. While Joe shakes hands, a half-dozen cameras click.

The proprietors of Kolgian Oriental Rug Galleries, just west of the Busy Bee on Beacon, have unrolled a literal red carpet at the diner’s entrance. Joe pauses at its edge, extends his arms and gives a courtly bow, then strolls across it and into the restaurant. The crowd loves this.

Joe’s sense of humor is legendary at the Busy Bee. Donna, another waitress, likes to share his one-liners with customers who missed them. “He says, ‘Why couldn’t I have been rich instead of beautiful?’ ” she reports with a laugh.

 “We laugh a lot,” says Arlene Miller, Joe’s 69-year-old daughter, who has driven in from Rhode Island for the party. “He always has something funny to say, even on the telephone.”

Some patrons speculate that laughter is the secret of Joe’s longevity, but competing theories abound. What’s gotten Joe through, Peter insists, is eating at the Busy Bee several times a week for so many years.

“He doesn’t drink water,” suggests Robert DiVaio, owner of Brookline Body and Skin Care Associates, who has been dining at the Busy Bee for “15 or 20 years” himself. “I’m always telling my clients, ‘You have to hydrate,’ ” says DiVaio, bemused. “Joe does just the opposite, and he’s 100 years old.”

Joe, who explains that it’s only tap water he won’t drink, says that “everybody” has asked him his secret at some point. “I tell them, ‘Just keep breathing,’ ” he says with a laugh. “If you keep breathing, you won’t die.”

By now, Joe has found his way to his usual stool. He always sits at the counter, according to the waitstaff, and brushes off suggestions that, at his age, he might be more comfortable in a booth. “He says, ‘That’s a poor excuse,’ ” one customer discloses.

The birthday cake, decorated with a Native American motif and topped with a big teepee, looms behind him on the counter. A caramel-skinned man whose sleepy eyes belie the energy he brings to a conversation, Joe is of Narragansett and Pequot ancestry. Born in Rhode Island, he came to Boston in the mid-1930s and worked for many years as a chef at the Gateway, a restaurant in South Station. From 1974 until his retirement three years ago — yes, he retired in ’97, at 97 — Joe worked as a resident groundskeeper and building manager for the New England Hebrew Academy on Prescott St. He still lives there.

Joe can’t say how long, exactly, he’s been eating at the Busy Bee, but he’s happy to say how often he eats there: “Not every day, but four or five days a week,” he estimates. “And after that, there aren’t so many days left in the week.”

Joe likes the daily specials. “The best menu in Massachu-setts,” he declares. “Every day you’ve got something different. And it’s not just one or two things to choose from, it’s seven or eight.”

People keep shouldering through to shake Joe’s hand, give him a hug, or have their picture taken with him. A substantial slice of cake waits on the counter behind him, hardly touched.

“Are you surprised?” someone asks him, apparently unaware that Joe has been talking up the party for nearly a year.

 “Surprised?” Joe says. “I’m   devastated.”    

 “Won’t you have some cake?” Donna encourages.

 “No,” Joe says. “I want some chowder.”

14 July 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations