farragutpress

Retirement age 65, +27, for Dorothy

At Apple Cake Tea Room for 35+ years, 92-year-old didn’t really want to retire

March 19, 2025 by Tammy Cheek

How many people start a new career in their mid 50s, then end up loving what they do so much their service lasts more than 35 years?

After almost 36 years with Apple Cake Tea Room, Dorothy Graves, 92, decided to retire last December.

“I miss you so much,” Apple Cake Tea Room owner Mary Henry told Dorothy.

“I’ve tried a little bit of everything around here,” Dorothy reflected. “I hated to have to retire because I wasn’t ready to retire, but I had a bad hip, and I had to have it taken care of.

“When you’re on your feet four hours a day, why, you have to take care of yourself,” she added. “But I just like to work.”

For Henry, Dorothy has been more than an employee. She has been a friend, confidant, therapist and even, like “I Love Lucy’s” Lucy and Ethel, fellow conspirators at times.

“Dorothy and I are like two peas in a pod,” Henry said. “We knew, pretty much, what our right arm was doing all the time.

“We would just zig and zag and do everything together. We worked very well together,” she added.

And for at least one young employee, the retiree was his “Civil War grandma.”

Dorothy’s leaving has affected Henry “very much,” the owner said, adding her three daughters are coming in to help now.

“She’s done everything here,” Henry remarked of Dorothy. She related Dorothy’s attributes: “wise, honest, her faith, sincere, trust-worthy … just a very honorable lady.

“She has taught all these girls and boys well here,” Henry added. “She taught them how to cook; taught them how to bake. She’s been our teacher and friend.”

Dorothy started her career with Apple Cake Tea Room in September 1989, six years after Henry opened the business in November 1983 in a little corner of Station West. She moved the business to her current location in the log cabin a year later.

Dorothy had just retired in March 1989 from Yale Commercial Lock & Hardware in Lenoir City, where she put in 35 years, because her husband had a stroke.

After he passed away in May 1989, “I had worked so long, I couldn’t stay at home anymore,” Dorothy recalled.

So, when she saw a sign advertising a dishwasher position vacancy at Apple Cake Tea Room, “I come up here and I started washing dishes,” she said.

“She is my first cousin’s mother-in-law,” Henry said of Dorothy. “I mentioned to my first cousin that I needed a dishwasher, and the next day, (Dorothy) showed up.

“I said ‘What are you doing here?’ She said, ‘I came to wash your dishes.’”

Dorothy continued in that position for six months until Henry “fixed the baking kitchen upstairs,” the retiree recalled. “I went to work up there for 10 1/2 years.”

Dorothy baked all the cakes, muffins, banana nut bread, chicken salad and brownie pies. “I just made it all,” she said with a laugh. Her favorite thing to make was the banana nut bread.

“Then, I messed my shoulder up and had to have surgery,” she added. “When I come back to work, I told Mary, ‘I can’t do that (baking) anymore.’

“Everything we bake is from scratch. I said, ‘I can’t stir anymore,’ so I came downstairs to hostess (in 2000), and I’ve been hostess every since.”

However, Dorothy also pitched in as waitress and cashier.

“You have to help out people when you work here,” she said about her duties. “You just do a little bit of everything.”

“She went to the store and did everything for me,” Henry said of Dorothy. “She was my right arm. I could not have done it without her, and she’s as honest as the day is long. If somebody owed me 3 cents out of the register and didn’t pay me, she put the 3 cents in at the end of the day.

“A lot’s happened in those years,” the owner added. “We’ve seen Farragut change. We were the only place here, across the street from the Pilot, when we opened over here.”

“When I first came to work here, there was nothing but one filling station,” Dorothy said.

Now “all the trees were taken down. It became very, very commercial,” Henry added.

Dorothy decided to stay those 35-plus years because “I’m the type of person that when I get a job, I don’t want to have to go hunt another one.”

At the tea room, “You meet a lot of people, and in all these years I have really acquired a lot of friends,” she said. “And, I just like to work here.”

Working with Henry, “her and I got along real well,” Dorothy said. “I couldn’t work for anybody any better. She’s good to her customers and her employees.

“She’s there for you if you need her,” she added about Henry. “I’d still be working if it wasn’t for my hip.”

Her fondest memories revolve around “just being around all the employees because they ranged from 18 to 35,” she said. “I was kind of like a momma to them.

“They all called me granny.”