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Credit: Nick Romanenko
Jane Doolittle, a baker in the Busch
campus bake shop
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Position: Baker, the bake shop on Busch campus
Length of Service: 25 years
Residence: South River
What she does: Doolittle is a baker at the Busch campus bake shop, not far from the Neilson Dining Hall on Douglass, where during high school she waitressed at special events. Working the 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shift, Doolittle does what bakers do: plans recipes, mixes ingredients, bakes, frosts, slices and readies the confections for delivery. As a top-level or “A” baker, she also oversees the workers on her shift. Each day, the bake shop team – 13 employees split day and night shifts – produces approximately 170,000 dinner rolls, 100 loaves of bread and three desserts, which might include 3,500 cookies, 120 pies, 100 layer cakes or 22 sheet cakes, for the five dining halls and several snack bars on the New Brunswick/Piscataway campus. The group also caters meetings and special events (they even make wedding cakes) and fries fresh doughnuts twice a day for the Dunkin’ Donuts on Livingston campus, made to conform to company specifications.
What she enjoys about her job: Doolittle’s attraction to the baking life began with its lark-like hours, which allowed her to be home for her children, now teenagers. In those early morning hours, she also appreciates the professionalism (and cheerfulness) of her colleagues, who work collaboratively to achieve volume and quality. They include executive pastry chef Anthony Cardinale, bake shop manager; Earl Bunting, head baker, a former bakery owner; Vinh Long, owner of Heish Bakery in South Plainfield; Randall D’Agostino, whose family owns La Bonbonniere bake shops; and Joseph Abate, former owner of Carousel Baker in Hazlet. Doolittle is proud of working her way up from cleaning pots and pans and mopping the floor in a predominantly male profession. “Baking is still a man’s world,” says Doolittle, one of three female employees in the shop and the only female senior baker. “But we have fun together – I don’t let them get away with too much machismo.”
Back to school: This year Doolittle, who attended Rutgers for a year after high school but left to work full time at the bake shop, decided to enroll in Rutgers’ Elena Buchanan Transition Program, a pre-college course that helps adult students prepare for the rigors of study at University College in New Brunswick. She is reacquainting herself with subjects like biochemistry, geography and writing. “The work is lot harder than I remember it, but
a good hard,” she says. Doolittle hopes to enroll at University College and take one or two courses each semester. “My kids are going to be starting college in a couple of years,” she says. “I don’t want them to graduate before me.”
Sidelights: Doolittle happens to be the great-grand niece of Lt. Gen. James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle, a World War II Army Air Forces commander who was perhaps the best known American airman and a pioneer of instrument flying. “When my father was a kid, Jimmy would take them on flights at family reunions. Unfortunately, I never
met him.”
Special thanks: “I’d like to thank my boss, Tony. He’s really generous when it comes to employees needing time for family crises.”
Know someone who deserves to be in the spotlight? Contact Focus editor Carla Cantor at
ccantor@ur.rutgers.edu.
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