Waitress served up coffee, eggs and meaningful bonds

In the predawn darkness of Halloween morning, it seems as if the coffee at The Continental Restaurant in Buffalo Grove doesn't tastes quite as good, says heartbroken owner Pete Panayiotou. Shirley Gibson, the waitress who was so much more than a waitress, is dead. She leaves behind three grown children, a distraught boss and co-workers, and a devoted following of loyal customers.

“We're not just customers. We're more like family,” says Paul Zucker, one of the middle-aged businessmen in the regular breakfast club that has been meeting almost every workday morning and even some weekends for 25 years, the last 15 at the Continental, where they enjoyed a routine with Shirley, who'd open the doors early in the morning for them.

“We get there at 5:30 and the cook doesn't get there till 6,” Paul says. Shirley would have coffee and a friendly smile waiting for Paul, Mike, Rich, Joe and Al. She knew what they wanted to eat and would have the order waiting for the chef.

“She knew 90 percent of the regular customers, all of them, by first names, and what they were going to order,” says Pete, who notes that his wife, Zena, considers Shirley one of their family. Monday they laughed at the memory of the Halloween when Shirley got a toupee, borrowed a shirt from Zena and came to the restaurant masquerading as Pete.

Shirley was the first employee Pete hired when he started his restaurant in 1995. He met Shirley in 1987 when he was a busboy and she was a single mom and a waitress at a 24-hour restaurant in Cary. Shirley excelled in classes to become a legal secretary, but quickly returned to waitressing.

“When I was really young, she'd have to work all kinds of hours,” remembers Shirley's daughter, Maria Jandak, 37, a social worker at Hinsdale Middle School who lives in Bolingbrook. “Sometimes she'd work doubles (back-to-back shifts) and six or seven days a week.”

Maria and brothers Tony Gibson, 33, of Foristell, Mo., and Michael Mabry, 29, of Palatine, took turns staying with their mom after she suffered a stroke three months ago.

“We were able to spend the last couple of weeks with her and that was so special,” Maria says of Shirley, who died about 5:45 p.m. Friday in her Palatine home.

At the Continental, caring customers besieged Pete Panayiotou with questions about Shirley and requests to phone them with updates.

“At lunch, 20 people would call me over to the table: 'How's Shirley,'” Pete says. “Everybody knows Shirley. They all come in for Shirley.”

And she came in for them.

“She always said the place was kind of like a ‘Cheers,' where everybody knows everybody,” Maria says. “It was her home away from home.”

Shirley's last day of work on Aug. 1 started as it always did with the breakfast club.

“She came to the table and poured some coffee. Mike was the first to notice that something didn't look right with Shirley,” Paul says. “So we went back to look for her and that's when we found her on the floor.”

Recognizing the symptoms of a stroke, Mike got Shirley off the floor and into a chair, Paul called 9-1-1 and Rich ran to the Dominick's next door to get aspirin. “Shirley's sick! I'll come back to pay for this later!” Rich shouted as he grabbed the bottle and ran back to Shirley's side.

After a week or so in the hospital, Shirley was recovering from her stroke. But when the difficulty with walking and communicating returned, more tests revealed that Shirley suffered from an aggressive form of amyloidosis, a rare disorder in which abnormal proteins attack the organs and nervous system in a way similar to cancer. She lost weight and strength and her body was ravaged by the chemotherapy.

She'd have bad days, and also days that gave people hope. She even visited the restaurant.

“I picked her up like a little baby and all the customers were clapping,” Pete says. “She said, ‘I want to get home. I want to get strong, and go back to work.' God bless her.”

Today's visitation for Shirley will be from 3 p.m. until a memorial service begins at 8 p.m. at Glueckert Funeral Home, 1520 N. Arlington Heights Road in Arlington Heights. Customers, including the breakfast bunch, will be there.

“I'm sure they (Shirley's kids) would like to know how much she touched our lives,” says Paul, who can tell stories about Shirley coming to visitations for customers' loved ones, or about how the customers took Shirley out to dinner to celebrate her 50th birthday.

“She shared in their lives, whether it was weddings or the birth of new babies or funerals,” Maria says of her mom, who became a grandma last February with the birth of Maria's son, Dylan. “That's just who she was. She really cared about them. It gives us comfort to know other people see in her what we grew up with. She was that mother figure and friend to all of us.”

Shirley's ashes will be interred Thursday in a private ceremony on what would have been her 61st birthday.