Popular Olde Towne Wine & Cheese Deli cashier Nate Donelson has returned from a six-month hiatus.

Date published: 10/18/2002

ONE OF Fredericksburg's hardest workers is back on the job.

And that's a darn good thing.

Olde Towne Wine & Cheese's Nate Donelson, the duke of the deli, the king of cashiers, is working again at the downtown lunch spot after about a six-month hiatus.

You know who I'm talking about.

Glasses. Beard. Ball cap, sometimes backward, sometimes forward. The guy behind the counter who knows your name and your order before you can say a word.

He's a person so familiar to anyone who's eaten downtown that he gets the special newspaper treatment whereby we refer to him by first name throughout the column. (READ: Madonna, Prince etc.)

When I moved here nearly five years ago, I wanted to patronize businesses where workers remembered my name.

It wasn't an ego thing. I just didn't know anyone--all my friends lived in or closer to D.C.--and if someone knew me I felt at least some small bond.

I didn't meet Nate until I had lived here for a while, but he is the ultimate example of this.

Normally, my editors would laugh if I told them I wanted to write about the guy who runs the cash register at a restaurant.

But Nate probably touches more lives in a week than many of us do all year. He estimated that Olde Towne has at least 500 customers who come in at least once a week.

The 26-year-old has lived here since he was 13. The steel mill where his dad worked in Pennsylvania closed, and the family moved here.

He's been working since he graduated from Stafford High School. He came to the deli in April 1997.

He left the restaurant in February to concentrate on his other job as sound engineer for the local band McLaws Drive.

But, he said: "It didn't feel right when I wasn't working there."

So Nate returned last month, and patrons have noticed.

Some asked, "Oh my gosh, where have you been?"

Others jokingly inquired, "Were you in jail?"

And still others became regulars while Nate was gone.

"They're wondering who I am," he said.

Nate said he and his coworkers keep a list of names and descriptions of regulars so they can recognize the familiar sandwich-eaters.

Date published: 10/18/2002