Active senior still enjoys waiting tables

If you’ve been to the DiCicco’s in Old Town Clovis, you may have been served by Mary Jo Pople. As a waitress, she greets her customers, takes their orders and makes sure their dining experience is as pleasant as possible. Aside from her dynamic waitressing skills, what diners may not notice about Pople is her age. While most people retire around 65, Pople is 80 and going strong.
“I’ve been waitressing for 54 years and I love that kind of work,” she says. Pople was a waitress at the former Del Webb Hotel the day it opened and was there about 5 1/2 years. She’s also held many other waitressing jobs in her more than half-a-century-long career. “I tell everybody it’s my social life.”
Pople also has a long association with DiCicco’s. She and her family used to dine frequently at the former DiCicco’s on Cedar Avenue and Fountain Way when it was housed in a tiny space in the strip mall on the property. While they enjoyed the food and the people who worked there, Pople found the eatery small and cramped.
“Mr. [Nick] DiCicco, one of the original brothers, he begged me to come work for him,” Pople says. “I told him ‘If you ever build a new place, I’ll come work for you.’ ”
Unbeknownst to Pople, a new, larger restaurant was being built in the front end of the parking lot. It opened its doors in 1971.
“The day it opened, I was there,” she says.
Pople worked at the restaurant for 20 years. She retired to take care of her ailing husband.
“I took care of him until he died,” she says of his passing in 2001. “Then I just sat around, until one day I said, ‘I can’t live like this.’ I called up DiCicco’s and they gave me a job over the phone.”
She returned to work, this time at the Old Town Clovis location, in 2006.
“She loves what she does, she loves people and I think the customers see that,” says Sandy DiCicco, co-owner.
Just a few months after landing the job — at the age of 75 — she was dealt another devastating blow. She was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent surgery and went back to work, declining to go through follow-up chemo treatments that would keep her from her active lifestyle.
“I refused all of their therapy,” she says.
“She’s always positive, never down,” DiCicco says, noting that Pople tends to keep her problems to herself and out of the dining room. “She’s very upbeat, always smiling.”
Although Pople is only scheduled to work Sunday and Monday evenings, she often works three, four, five, or sometimes six nights a week.
“If they need me, I’ll go,” she says.
DiCicco describes the working environment at the restaurant as like that of a family. Many of her employees have been there for years. Pople’s long-association with the family-owned and -operated restaurant adds to that sense of family.
DiCicco’s husband, Vittorio, has known Pople most of his life, having met her when he was 8 or 9 when she first went to work for his father at the former Cedar Avenue location. Long-time customers are also part of that extended family of the restaurant. Pople has her share of customer friends.
“She does have customers that, once they found out she was here, they’ve followed her over,” DiCicco says.
Pople is also very involved outside of DiCicco’s. She is the greeter coordinator for People’s Church — for which she gets up at 4 a.m., arrives by 6:30 a.m. and then turns around and is back at DiCicco’s from 4 p.m. to close every Sunday — and is the secretary treasurer of the Greyhound Retirees’ Club.
“My husband was a Greyhound bus driver,” she says. “They bestowed his rights on me when he died. I’m the first woman ever elected to office.”
In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her eight children, 13 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild. There are two more great-great-grandchildren on the way.
“She’s got a lot of energy,” DiCicco says. “I don’t know where she gets it. Mary Jo doesn’t seem like she’s 80. With her energy and how she looks and dresses, she seems like she’s in her 50s.”
Pople, who’ll be 81 this spring, says she doesn’t plan on retiring any time soon. She’s having too much of a good time keeping busy to want to slow down.”
“I’ll work as long as I can,” Pople says. “I think I’ll know when the time comes, but right now I’m keeping up with the young ones.”
“She’s a pretty special lady,” DiCicco says. “There are not many like her out there and we’re pretty lucky to have her.”