Bill Crocker is mad. After 29 years in the restaurant industry, he is forced — again — to rebuild his reputation, damaged this time by an event that lasted only a few short minutes.
On Aug. 5, a man entered Crocker’s Restaurant in Cuyahoga Falls and pumped three bullets into Crocker’s chef, Mark Burton, in plain view of a crowded room of Saturday night diners. Fredrick Nelson, who is on trial for a death penalty charge of aggravated murder, then scalped his victim before fleeing across the Ohio border into Pennsylvania, where he was arrested by a Pennsylvania state officer.
Now Crocker is trying to recover. Again.
“It happens a lot of places, but you never think it’s going to happen to you. Then, it happens right beneath your nose,” Crocker says. “There was a lot of grief early, then there was madness. I got mad that the restaurant was victimized … and the staff members who work here were victimized, and that the customers who were here were victimized.
“Crocker’s is a neighborhood restaurant. The majority of these people were hurt by this incident. This is where they bring their family, their children. People were hurt by this.”
Crocker is no stranger to adversity. Between 1979 and 1993, he owned, and then lost due to financial difficulties, three popular Akron-area restaurants: Bill Crocker’s Restaurant, Starboard Tack and Billy’s.
Five years ago, he started over, opening his newest venture, Crocker’s Restaurant, in Cuyahoga Falls, turning it into a profitable, family-oriented, neighborhood establishment. Two years ago, he reached his million-dollar sales goal — “a key goal that I had hoped for” — primarily by building a loyal local customer base.
Crocker, who is known to greet his customers at the door with a towel draped over his shoulder, works every shift except Mondays.
“If you’re going to put your name on the sign, people expect your presence,” he says, even if his presence there keeps him away from his wife and family, which includes a 1-year-old son.
Crocker still does this, knowing that owning several restaurants, or even one higher-volume restaurant, would allow him to hire a layer of management that would give him the freedom not to have to work five days a week. But he has no desire to try to bring back the old days.
“I was a horrible administrator of three businesses,” he says frankly. “I wouldn’t let go of control of things. I went from being totally adequate to totally inadequate. When you administer three businesses, you start to lose contact with the customer.”
His attorney and friend, Bob Meeker, knows that Crocker’s trump card is his presence.
“Bill Crocker is his own best public relations firm, and his own best image maker,” Meeker says. “He has his own little brand of charisma — and he draws people for that reason.”
It might just be that charisma that ultimately helps him overcome the August tragedy.
Within a day of the incident, Crocker was bombarded with phone calls and cards from peers consoling, sympathizing, and most important, advising.
“I received input from other people who have had the same experiences, who actually called me on the phone and said, ‘Look, I just want you to know how long it took us to get back on our feet,'” Crocker says.
He says that someone even called from The Cathedral Buffet, which had a hauntingly similar experience several years ago.
“Universally, most of them said, ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing on a daily basis. And don’t do anything too terribly different,” he says.
Crocker followed that advice when the restaurant reopened the following weekend. He cleared his calendar of all off-site meetings and made sure he was at the door to greet every customer, at every meal, for the next two weeks.
“I thought that I would be the best person to respond to any kind of thing anyone would ask — until I felt as though we were settled down a little bit,” he says.
Meeker agrees that it will be Crocker’s personal attention to the business that will allow him to overcome the recent setback.
“He’s been bearing down on this issue of re-establishing the business, and we’ve been watching closely as it builds back,” he says. “I’m sure it’s going to build back.”
Crocker’s customers weren’t his only concern. He also had to address the reactions of his employees, especially those who had witnessed the event.
“I could tell from the reaction of the employees who were there that night that it would be extremely important that they get some help, as soon as he could arrange it,” Meeker recalls.
While Crocker admits “it wasn’t the first thing I thought of when this happened,” at the advice of his attorney, he set up a crisis intervention program for employees the following Tuesday.
Even though the session wasn’t mandatory, every employee showed up.
The counseling session was run by the Victim’s Assistance Program of Akron, a private, nonprofit social service organization founded in 1972. The center, which is funded through grants from private foundations and contracts from the cities of Akron and Cuyahoga Falls, is barely known, yet assisted nearly 20,000 people last year.
“The business community’s last thought on their mind is for a tragedy to reach the workplace,” says Katy Lehner, assistant director, and the licensed social worker who worked with Crocker’s employees. “But when it does, and when that happens, they’re at a loss.”
Lehner ran a one-day program for Crocker’s employees that followed the same model used for the victims of the Columbine High School shootings and for the employees in the federal building bombing in Oklahoma City.
“The main goal is to allow the victims and the witnesses an opportunity to ventilate and to process what has happened,” she says. “A lot of times, an event happens, life goes on, and that’s it. Our goal is to go in there and educate them on crisis reaction. When someone experiences a crisis, they’re going to have a normal reaction to a very abnormal event.”
Lehner says that an event like the shooting at Crocker’s is not something most people are ever going to experience.
“So people that haven’t been through something like this aren’t going to be prepared for the reactions that follow,” she says.
Lehner set up the program for Crocker’s employees around four key questions: What were your reactions? How did you respond? How are you responding now? How do you see yourself responding in the future?
“When someone is the victim of a shooting or something like this, what you often find is that your senses just pop in,” she says. “Things might be sticking out in your mind, like ‘I can’t get the smell of blood out of my nose,’ or ‘Any time I hear a car backfire, I think something’s happening again,’ or ‘All I heard was people screaming — complete chaos.'”
She says that the goal of the session is to walk people through the experience and their reactions, to prevent post-traumatic stress.
“To go into a group setting and hear that other people have experienced the same things really helps to validate that ‘No, I’m not going crazy. Everything that I’m experiencing is perfectly normal,'” she says.
Meeker says that addressing the aftermath immediately will work in Crocker’s favor. He should know. In the ’80s, Meeker owned The Balch Street Athletic Club, which he has since sold to the city and the county.
When he owned the club, a man accidentally drowned in the swimming pool.
“It was always my worst fear,” he recalls.
He quickly made the decision to close the pool, empty it, acid wash it, then renovate it. Soon after, the coroner found that the drowning victim had the AIDS virus. But because of Meeker’s swift reaction to the incident, it didn’t affect his business.
“My members really appreciated how I had handled it,” he recalls. “It didn’t affect my membership at all, because I took immediate action.”
Three months later, Crocker is still working to build back the business volume he had before the incident. He has moved an assistant chef into Mark Burton’s position and continues to work every shift except Mondays, greeting as many customers as he can.
And while business is still down, he has no plans to give up.
“After 29 years of working weekends and nights, magnified by the fact that I have a 1-year-old son at home and my wife would like me to be home more, it’s probably getting to me a little more right now than it ever has,” he admits. “But I’ve made my own bed here.”
In fact, he is moving forward with plans to buy his building on Front Street.
“For us to be visible and to start to heal and move on is important,” he says. “I know that’s the way Mark would have wanted it. Mark loved the restaurant business, he had such a passion for it. He lived it, walked it, talked it in his professional life.
“He would have wanted us to do exactly what we’re doing.” Connie Swenson ([email protected]) is editor of SBN.
A lesson learned?
A police investigation concluded that the wife of the alleged murderer, one of Crocker’s waitresses, was having an affair with the victim, Mark Burton.
So, the age-old dilemma comes to bear, once again: How do you separate work and personal lives? And can an employer enforce a separation policy?
“From a business standpoint, many businesses have a policy that people that work in the business are not permitted to date,” says attorney Bob Meeker. “Some places don’t even let married people work at the same establishment.”
Meeker says that while the concept is a good one, he’s not sure of the legality of regulating it.
“You could say policywise that you would ask your staff not to socialize where they work, but it falls on deaf ears,” says Bill Crocker. “It seems that the nature of this business is that people have the tendency to socialize. When the business closes at midnight or 1 a.m., there’s not a lot of choices.”
Crocker has made it a personal policy not to socialize with employees after hours, but doesn’t think it’s something he can enforce across the board. He and Meeker agree that, for now, it may just have to be a decision each employee makes.
“This is a really good lesson for us all,” Meeker says, “but particularly for the Crocker’s workers who have had to go through this: Why it’s important to have your personal life in control, and not coming into the workplace.
“It’s a tough lesson for us all to learn.”
