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Frank Carcamo can't tell the story of Reeves Restaurant and Bakery without his sidekick, waitress Gertrude Sweeney.
The two have spent a combined total of 102 years running this "Washington tradition," so any recollection of its 115year history just wouldn't be complete without her.
Carcamo, the majority owner of the downtown D.C. restaurant, can hardly sit still anyway, so he jumps up to fetch the 76-year-old waitress. He escorts her by the elbow back to a booth. The petite woman sits quietly on one side of the twoperson booth and Carcamo squeezes in next to her practically on top of her. It's plain to see they're comfortable together.
"If I ever become a widow," the Honduran native says, as his wife Ines stands nearby, "I'm gonna marry her."
Sweeney and Carcamo are just two of a cast of hundreds that have kept Reeves cooking over the last century. Their kind of longevity is hard to beat in a city marked by government operations and transitional residents.
"A centenarian company is a remarkable phenomenon," says Jim Lea, a family business analyst and a columnist for Washington Business Journal.
Loyola University of Chicago professor "John Ward's mosscovered statistic - 30 percent survive to the second generation, 15 percent to the third - is still the standard," Lea says.
Only a handful of small businesses in Greater Washington can lay claim to 100-year-old operations. Among them: Alexandria's Thomas J. Fannon & Sons, which delivers fuel...