Courtesy Photo Hotel Frederick at 327 N. Market St. as it was in the 1930s.

The five daughters of former Hotel Frederick owners Michael J. Croghan Jr. and Anna Margaret Anders Croghan have created a scholarship endowment at Frederick Community College for students in the culinary arts and hospitality program. The endowment recognizes the hospitality careers of the two longtime Frederick residents, both of whom died in 2006.

"When FCC started the culinary and hospitality program, my father read about it in the newspaper and thought it was a wonderful idea," said the Croghan's middle daughter, Ellen Lewis.

"He knew from experience that training employees takes a lot of time and effort. He also knew the importance of loyal, capable employees. He depended upon and appreciated the people who worked for him and for my grandfather. They were like family to us," she said.

FCC is in the process of creating a new facility for the culinary and hospitality programs at its Advanced Workforce Training Center on Monroe Avenue. The new center will enable additional class offerings to provide trained workers in the hotel and restaurant businesses.

Mike Croghan Jr. grew up helping his parents, Michael J. Croghan Sr. and Hilda Brown Croghan, in the several hotels they managed or owned, which included Hotel Braddock, Hill Top House in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., The Vindabona Hotel in Braddock Heights, and Hotel Frederick at 327 N. Market St.

Michael Croghan Sr. came to the United States from Ireland at the age of 19. His son was born in 1921 and became the only one of six children who remained in the family business. The father was assisted by his sister, Patricia Croghan Warner, for 12 years before her family moved to New York.

Mike Jr. and his wife "Marg" married in 1948 and raised their five daughters at the hotel, operating it for 35 years. They expanded the business to include Hotel Frederick Catering. The hotel was sold in 1972 and later razed to create a municipal parking lot.

A memoir is written

The Croghans enjoyed retirement in their Braddock Heights cabin and in 2001 the daughters gave their father a computer to record his life story.

At 80 years old, he rose to the challenge of learning to use it, and his memoir includes great detail about the hotel and restaurant business in Frederick from the 1930s through the 1960s.

One of his earliest recorded memories was the evening meal at Hotel Braddock, which his parents operated during the summer until it was destroyed by fire in 1929.

"The first course was usually juice or fruit, followed by a soup, then a fish course before the meat, potatoes and vegetables, followed then by a salad. Then came dessert, followed by coffee and cigars for the men. All of this was just part of the weekly rate of $4.50 to $6 per day, or $22.50 to $35 weekly, American Plan (room and meals.)"

When Croghan graduated from high school in 1938, his father asked if he would be interested in going to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, N.Y. The memoir says, "I told him no, that I thought he would be a better teacher than I would get at school."

His father agreed with one caveat: he asked his son to find a job with "decent" hours for a few years. If he chose the hotel business, his father said that he would have the rest of his life to work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So he worked for F&M Bank for two years before serving a year in the Maryland State Guard in 1940 and then shipping out with the U.S. Army to the south Pacific for three and a half years.

He was discharged from the Army in 1946 and returned to the bank where he worked with a former school mate, Anna Margaret Anders Herbert, by then a war widow. The two were married in June of 1948 and left the bank to join the family business. Their second daughter, Jane, recalled that they always operated the business as a team.

Anna Croghan was the daughter of Guy and Virginia Burke Anders. Her father was the sheriff of Frederick County in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The sheriff's family lived at the jail in those days, so the wedding was held there as it was home of the bride's parents.

Her father always teased her mother about getting married at the jail, recalled Nancy, the couple's fourth daughter. According to Ellen, daughter number three, the jail was actually in a beautiful Victorian structure, now headquarters for the Frederick Rescue Mission at 419 W. South St.

Croghan renovated two rooms at Hotel Frederick into an apartment for himself and his bride. During the next 11 years, he and his employee, Clarence Diggs, renovated all 53 guestrooms of the hotel.

"We started a system of removing the wallpaper from five rooms each year, touching up the plaster and then having Mr. Eckard put on the new paper ... In those years, I became a regular customer of Thelma Cannon at Jacobsons, who was in charge of the wallpaper department, and formerly was one of our waitresses at Hotel Frederick when we were serving three meals a day before the war. I was able to spend a lot of my time those first few years (in renovating) as it took a while to build up the banquet and catering business," according to the memoir.

Throwing a party

As the Croghan girls grew up at Hotel Frederick , they assisted with every kind of job that had to be done, working as maids, waitresses, kitchen help, and catering crew. Hotel Frederick Catering provided everything needed for large parties, banquets, weddings and picnics. They often catered large employee picnics for Frederick companies such as Ox Fibre Brush Co. and American Optical, productions that required all available hands.

Croghan's memoir recalls, "We would work for two days preparing all the food and set it out on five long tables, which allowed a line to go down both sides. Those ten lines would clear the tables in 25 minutes, which took us 25 hours to prepare. As the years went on, I learned the real secret of making money on picnics. We would prepare all the food and pack it for the people to pick up and serve themselves.

"Today I am glad that I quit when I did, as now the town is crowded with caterers and have gone [sic] highbrow. No more of the small-town fried chicken and country ham affairs."

Croghan wrote that his biggest challenge during his catering career was the time he was hired to serve the banquet meal at the Rotary Club's district conference. Three-courses had to be served to 500 people in no more than one hour. With a staff of 24 waiters and waitresses working in carefully synchronized rotations, the meal was accomplished and the room cleared in 57 minutes.

Croghan received the following praise from a reporter who attended the event: "Here in Frederick , this writer believes the Hotel Frederick broke some kind of a record when it catered a three course dinner to over 500 Rotarians in the West Frederick High School. It was all done in three minutes less than the one hour Ed Hartmann, conference chairman, had specified.

"There was absolutely no sense of haste -- no waiter grabbed a plate before a dinner was through, as is often the case in big banquets in cities like New York and Washington. It was all done in so dignified a manner that few people knew that so short a time had been allotted for the meal."

Croghan kept a scrapbook of similar notes from satisfied customers and wrote that the kind comments meant as much to him as the checks included with the notes. He gave the credit for his success to his kitchen and dining room staff, and said he could never pay them what they were truly worth.

Some of his staff were the sons and daughters of people who had worked for his father at Hotel Braddock, and before his retirement, he had a few third generation employees working with him. He mentioned Bertha Fletcher, the record holder, with 50 years of service in the Croghan family businesses, and Shelton Boyce, Beulah Roop, Clarence Diggs, and Clara Eicholtz, all long-time, faithful employees.

As the hotel staff aged, Croghan found it harder to keep up with the hotel and catering business. Rather than hiring and training new staff, he decided to sell the property. After closing the hotel in 1972, he went to work for his brother, John T. Croghan, who had a building and plumbing business in Montgomery County.

Growing up in a hotel

The five daughters all agreed that growing up in the hotel in the 1950s and 1960s was great fun. "Meeting so many interesting people was the best part. We could write a book just about the hotel guests!"

Ellen added. "Sadly, as was the case all over the country in the late 1960s, downtown hotels suffered when shopping malls and newer motels were built on the outskirts of towns."

The heyday of downtown hotels, summer guests from Baltimore and Washington and tourism through the main thoroughfare of Frederick and into the nearby higher elevations waned with the progress of the interstate highways.

Croghan wrote in his memoir: "Then as the years went on and the tourist trade went by, first on the one-way streets and later on the bypass, and the state road survey crews went back to Baltimore each night, we had to resort to weekly rentals to keep the rooms full."

When he made the decision to sell, two buyers stepped up -- the City of Frederick and Carmack Jays, the grocery store next door.

"Both were interested only in the land and would take down the building," Croghan wrote. "I was asked by many, 'How could I tear down what my father had built in his lifetime?' My reply was that I would rather see it torn down than go by it in years to come and see it in a run-down condition, which most of the block was at that time ... The mayor and I were the only ones to know that the building dated from 1790."

The Croghan family

The Croghan's five daughters include Ann Calkins of Richmond, Va., administrator of a pre-school; Jane Jones of Baltimore, a nurse practitioner; Ellen Hendrickson Lewis of Berkeley Springs, W.Va., owner of the businesses Interior Plants, LLC, in Frederick and The Manor Inn B& B in Berkeley Springs; Nancy Cleary of County Clare, Ireland, overseer of an Irish guest house; and Laura Metcalf of Braddock Heights, also a nurse.

Three of the five sisters have ties to FCC. Ellen earned her associate's degree in business, and Laura earned her licensed practical nursing degree at FCC. Nancy worked in FCC's Continuing Education division and took classes at the college before moving to Ireland.

FCC president Carol Eaton said, "We admire the decision of the Croghan daughters to honor their parents by creating new opportunities for today's generation of hospitality and culinary workers. They understand, from personal experience, the challenges of the industry and the changing requirements for careers in these fields today."

To contribute to the Croghan hospitality scholarship, make checks payable to the FCC Foundation, Inc., with the fund's name in the memo line and mail to 7932 Opossumtown Pike, Frederick , MD 21702, or contact the FCC Foundation at foundation@Frederick .edu or 301.846.2438.