Bedtime story: Program teaches LV art form

It starts and ends with the bed.

Bleary-eyed and spent, seeping out of casino pits and showrooms, vacationers retire to the sanctuary of a clean room and a tightly made bed.

Rarely does anyone consider: Who snapped these fresh sheets over the mattress? Who fluffed these pillows? Was it a former welfare mother? A young refugee from a war-torn country? A homeless woman?

Guest room attendant Phyllis Barroner was 49 when her mobile home went up in flames in Georgia. Three years, eight states, and a handful of minimum-wage jobs later, she is homeless in Las Vegas. Three weeks ago she found a little piece of hope buried in a pink public housing complex in West Las Vegas, behind a window sign that says, "Culinary Union Training Center."

"I thought of a lot of places where I might end up," she said. "I never thought of Las Vegas. But this program has given me a plan, a hope. I'm thinking of making Las Vegas my home."

Hidden inside five apartments that have been converted into mock hotel rooms, the culinary union's guest room attendant training program is a small, but critical, linchpin in the Las Vegas resort economy.

By providing free housekeeping training to anyone, regardless of their work background, the center helps the disenfranchised enter the work force in jobs that start at about $10 an hour with benefits.

Simultaneously, it provides Las Vegas' hotels, which are multiplying like bunnies, with a steady stream of much-needed new employees. The 40-hour guest room attendant training program was created six years ago as a joint venture between the union and union hotels. The hotels pay 3 cents per-hour-worked by Culinary Union employees into a fund that is administered by a joint board of union and hotel representatives.

Last year the program drew in $1.2 million from the union hotels. The Culinary Union trains prospective employees for kitchen jobs at one site and for housekeeping jobs at another. More than 3,000 students received housekeeping training last year; 10 percent of those came straight from the welfare rolls.

Las Vegas has 109,365 hotel and motel rooms. With the March 2 opening of Mandalay Bay, another 3,700 will be added to the total, followed shortly by the 3,000-room Venetian and the 2,900-room Paris hotels. By year's end, the total number of hotel and motel rooms is expected to approach 120,000.

"Who's going to clean all those rooms?" Bernice Thomas, director of the Culinary Union housekeeping training program. "These people right here -- these people coming out of welfare or from wherever they're from, that's who. Whoever wants some training and is willing to work."

The average full-time guest room attendant cleans 15 or 16 rooms a day -- creating the demand for some 7,500 guest room attendants in the city. Resort housekeeping managers vie for qualified candidates and pluck the well-trained first from eligible worker pools.

"I'm glad that I'm not at Mandalay Bay or Paris or the Venetian," said Pat Hall, director of housekeeping at Caesars Palace, which hires guest room attendants trained at the center. "I'm glad that we opened our new tower a year and a half ago and hired already. It's hard to find enough (employees.) The center is a great resource. "It may not be glamorous work, but it pays."

Thomas said that, once trained, students get a certificate and move to the top of the union's to-be-hired list.

"The hotels want trained employees. They're calling me all the time, saying 'When are you going to graduate another batch?' " she said.

The funneling of prospective job candidates into the labyrinthine hotel halls may start at the welfare office, or at the homeless shelter, or at the battered women's home.

Sometimes it starts at the airport where foreign war refugees deplane, or at the Catholic and Episcopalian social service offices and black Baptist church buildings, or there at the curb on J Street, where neighbors of the HUD housing complex spot the first-floor window sign and knock on the door.

"The center is located there because it's in a neighborhood where a lot of our students come from," said Mark Solomon, executive director of the Culinary Union training programs. "It's open to anyone that is looking to go to work in the hotel business," Solomon said. "The only requirement is that they register with the Culinary Union."

It costs $22.50 to register with the Culinary Union; once employed, $32.50 per month comes out of the worker's paycheck for union dues. "Housekeeping jobs are the most plentiful, classes are among the shortest, and it's a job that you can get with limited English skills," Solomon said. "But you have to learn how to make that bed."

Bernice Thomas is speaking on the phone over the sustained inhale of a vacuum cleaner that, pushed by a student, makes neat tracks on the carpet 20 feet away from her desk. Thomas is telling the person on the phone to "come on down" for training.

"Bring your Social Security card, a union card, and a picture ID," she says. "And comfortable shoes. Don't forget comfortable shoes. Starts on Monday at 8."

Thomas, who has been the director of the guest room attendant program since its opening six years ago, considers herself an "instructor, counselor, and mama" to the students at the center.

"So many that come here we've got to counsel, because their self-esteem is so low. They get aggravated and want to quit real easy," she said. "We handle them with kid gloves, and tell them, 'Believe in yourself, you can do it. A quitter is a loser. Stick with it, and you'll be proud.' "

Thomas speaks from a lifetime of industry experience.

"When I was a kid I heard that you can set a goal and you can reach a goal," she said. "I told my mama that I wanted a job where I got to sit behind a desk." Born and raised in Louisiana, Thomas found herself married and in Las Vegas at an early age, with no job skills. In 1959, she got a job in housekeeping at the Mint -- now Binion's Horseshoe.

"When I started out as a maid, it was hard work, and there was no training," Thomas said. "I learned from trying and failing and trying again.

"But I always took pride in my job and interest in my job," Thomas said. "I would pay attention and ask questions, and I always kept trying."

Over the years, Thomas worked at the Riviera, El Rancho Vegas, Fremont, Sands, and Dunes hotels, moving up from her position as guest room attendant to inspector to assistant executive director.

"I've made I-don't-know-how-many beds," she said. "But what I really wanted to do was help people. When this came along, I knew I was going to get to help people. I've been in Las Vegas 40 years and this is the best program I've ever seen."

Thomas credits her staff -- four instructors who themselves have dozens of years of housekeeping experience -- and the union management for making the program work. Students are taught everything from the biohazards in cleaning chemicals to personal hygiene.

"It's more than just the bed and the bathroom. We teach them how to fill out an application, how to shake hands with an interviewer and how to look them in the eye," she said. "We've got people here from a lot of low places. I didn't know there were so many people out there who needed help. It can be real depressing. But when I see people's hard work pay off, when I get to see them succeed, that is my pay off. They walk out of here with a certificate and some pride and some skills and some hope. That is my payoff. I tell my students always be willing to go that extra mile," Thomas said.

At 52, Phyllis Barroner has gone the extra mile. And then some.

"I'm graduating today," she says, sitting in the training center office, smiling.

After losing everything in the fire that burned her mobile home to the ground, she decided to leave Georgia and work her way around the United States.

"I've been a jack of all trades -- a waitress, a clerk, a lot of things," she said.

There was a job or two in Florida, a stint in Nashville, and a long haul west.

After working the summer at Bryce Canyon in Utah as a park clerk, she found her way to Las Vegas and ended up at the MASH Village homeless shelter.

"I don't guess it's the ideal situation for anybody, but when I found myself broke and homeless, I was glad to go there," she said. "It's better than sleeping on the street. I just keep saying this little thing I read somewhere: 'Over mountains and valleys and rivers and streams, I've got to go and follow my dreams.' "

Her dreams of finding a stable income and a home may be realized through the training program, she said.

"I saw the union salaries, and I thought, this is going to work," she said.

After 40 hours of training she received a certificate: Guest Room Attendant Training Program Graduate. "I've already put in an application at Mandalay Bay," she said. "Hopefully I'll be working by next weekend. Then, hopefully when I get a couple of paychecks saved up I'll get my own place. I'm not looking for a large place.

"I've pretty well decided to make Las Vegas my home," she said. "I think now my traveling will be done on vacation."

Fifteen rooms a day; less than 30 minutes per room.

The work is honest. Guest room attendants get on their hands and knees and clean the toilets, lay a towel in the bathtub and stand inside to sanitize the shower walls as high as they can reach. There are dressers to dust and mirrors to wipe and ashtrays that must soak in soapy water. Tissue and toilet paper must receive the standard hotel fold, floors must be cleaned and vacuumed.

"Some may feel that they can't, but they can," Thomas said. "It's my goal to make them believe that.

"Attitude is most important. But as far as skills go, the bed is the hardest thing. Oh yes, it's the bed. Some of them have to do it over and over, because we don't send them off without knowing how to make the bed right. It's an art. " With about 200,000 of them filling the city's hotel rooms, a properly made hotel bed is a bonafide Las Vegas commodity.

"Before I went down there, I thought, 'Can't nobody teach me how to make a bed,' " Evelyn Tookes, a 56-year-old student, said. "But they did. They show you the proper way. It's so neat -- you want to make it look like it hasn't been touched."

At the training center, as in thousands of hotel rooms, the mattress lies like a canvas in front of a sheet-toting student. It is made with exacting standards. First, the sheet is centered on the bed. Then the blanket. One side is tucked in -- sheets and blankets aligned with the edges of the mattress -- and then the other. It gets box pleat corners. Thirty-degree angles. Symmetrical pillows. Envelope turndowns.

When it is done, it is tight enough to bounce a quarter, or casino chip, off of. It looks like cotton origami. Or the easily overlooked Las Vegas art form. "It's like making a butterfly," Tookes said.

Tookes moved to Las Vegas two months ago from Chicago, where she had been unemployed and taking care of her adult son who had suffered a stroke. After her boyfriend retired to Las Vegas, she decided to follow him out. "But I have no family here. My people are in Chicago. I have no one here except him, and I had been out of work for a while. So when I heard about the program, I thought well, OK.

"My boyfriend said, 'Baby don't you already know how to make a bed?' and I said, 'Well evidently I don't,' " Tookes said.

"It wasn't easy. I had a hard time with it. But my instructor was constantly encouraging me. I must have made a hundred beds."

"But I got the hang of it in the end, and I went home and showed (my boyfriend) what I'd learned," Tookes said. "I'll tell you what they learned," Thomas said.

"They learned to do something that is not easy, and they learned a positive attitude that will last them."

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