Office Hours is a Y News series focusing on unique artifacts that BYU employees display in their offices.
BYU’s 150th celebration is everywhere, even in an unassuming office behind the BYU Creamery Outlet. Inside, Brian Stauffer, the general manager of the Culinary Support Center (CSC), displays a treasure: a champaign fountain of glass goblets created for BYU’s 100th anniversary and now brought out for the 150th.
The vintage goblets were given to Stauffer by the Cloward family — descendants of Wells and Myrle Cloward, who began BYU’s dining services in 1952 with a small cafeteria in the basement of the Joseph Smith Building.
“Dining Services is built on the shoulders of generations of people who have worked really hard to bring us to where we are now,” Stauffer says. “The goblets represent 50 years of feeding and nurturing the students of BYU.”
The collection was made in a time before precision manufacturing. Each goblet is one of a kind, explains Stauffer as he traces his finger along a rim and pauses at the subtle dips and swells.
“They used to blow the glass and then cut it,” he says. “These misshapes in the goblet rim remind me that we can be unique and useful — making the best of what God has given us.”
Stauffer carefully returns the goblet to its place in the tower and explains that Dining Services is successful because of its heritage, amazing employees and teamwork. CSC is the central hub of the team, employing 250 students and more than two dozen full-time staff members who prepare food from scratch for dining halls and micro markets across campus.
Stauffer says that working with the students as they sacrifice, learn and grow is the best part of his job.
“Production work is hard and it takes getting up at 4 a.m.,” he says. “Students work before class and after class; they earn their degrees, and they also learn to work.”
Those work experiences leave lasting impressions. Many former student employees — now in their 30s or 40s — return to campus and reminisce about their time in the bakery, dairy lab, or other areas of the CSC. The students' stories, he says, come back to lessons learned through hard work.
Pointing to the glass goblet display, Stauffer emphasizes, “It’s all about the students.”
