My name is Valerie Jones. I donated old Wichita menus from restaurants around [town]. My dad’s name was Paul Stevens. He wrote the curriculum and taught the first culinary arts class at [Wichita Area Vocational-Technical School], and he just really liked different menus and the different colors and the different way people presented the food.
He just collected menus from everywhere, but the Wichita ones are just kind of for home. He landed a job at Wichita Boeing as the manager of the cafeteria. So back in the day, they had a huge cafeteria for the employees, and he was the manager of that for a few years.
He was a chef, and he really loved food and cooking and restaurants, and he collected menus from all over. There are quite a few of the older ones. And I grew up here, so it's kind of nostalgic to look at some of those menus.
He was pretty prominent within the restaurant world. We would go in a restaurant and some cook would come out, the chef would come out and say, “Paul, you got to come see my kitchen,” and he would take me, and we [would] go look at the kitchen. He was just well-known. ...I think he probably paid for some of them, but I'm sure they gave [free food] to him.
Well, that is an apocryphal story that he helped some of these, like he might have been part of Livingston's. He might have been part of Don’s and Doc’s. All of those I can't prove. It was a long time ago.
