Area caterer was chef to U.S. presidents Johnson & Nixon

Right out of high school, Doug Scarlett said he joined the U.S. Air Force to avoid the draft for Vietnam.

“They promised me I’d be with the medics,” said Scarlett, who grew up in Michigan, where his father was a county coroner and ran an ambulance service.

But once finished with basic training, Scarlett said the Air Force sent him to cooking school. “They made me a cook,” he said.

Scarlett, a member of the Crossville Rotary Club, was the guest speaker at a recent meeting of the Breakfast Rotary Club of Oak Ridge.

“I went to cooking school in Virginia and graduated No. 1 (in his class),” Scarlett said. Then, the Air Force sent him to culinary school, where he also graduated top of the class.

After that, the Air Force sent him to Great Falls, Mont., to attend dietary school. It was while taking care of patients’ meals in the hospital there that Scarlett said he was informed one day that he had a telephone call from the Pentagon.

“I’m a jokester, and the way I was, I thought everybody was fooling me,” he said. “Everybody was standing right there when I took the call.”     But, the telephone call was no joke.

The caller asked Airman Scarlett if he’d be interested in taking a job as a general’s aide at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, he said.

Before long, Scarlett said he packed up his family’s belongings and he and his wife were on the way to Maryland.

“I got to the base, I pulled up and told them my name. They made me pull over to the side. ‘Great, I thought, I haven’t been on base long enough to get in trouble,’” he said. Then, an official car pulled up.

“I was in plain clothes, hadn’t shaved. They took me to see the base commander,” he said.

Scarlett said he was told his job -- working on board Air Force One as a chef to the president.

“‘Nobody’s to know what you’re doing,’” Scarlett said his superiors told him. “I made staff sergeant in less than three years.”

“It was my job to feed the president. It was my option to feed the first family,” he said. Scarlett said he served regular meals -- steak, pasta, etc. -- on Air Force One. “If you were a pilot, you got fed well,” he said.

“We got to fly around a lot,” Scarlett said, explaining he was one of two chefs on board the presidential jet that served Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.

“I liked the clout, and I heard a lot of conversations,” he told The Oak Ridger. “It was an interesting career,” Scarlett said of his four years on Air Force One.

The job and Scarlett’s duties were declassified by the government years ago, he said, so he can now talk about the experience. “I just had good fun,” he said.

Since his time in the Air Force, Scarlett said he has worked in the catering business and currently owns a Crossville-based company that caters events around the country.

In addition, Scarlett is a disaster response volunteer with the American Red Cross. Most recently, he responded to North Carolina during Hurricane Irene. He was part of the Red Cross organization’s efforts to staff six mobile kitchens that provided meals to 12,000 people per day in the days after the hurricane made landfall.

And, like on board Air Force One during his time in the Air Force, the menu options in the Red Cross mobile kitchens are “regular food.”

“You don’t just get a baloney sandwich,” Scarlett said.

Leean Tupper can be contacted at (865) 220-5501.