LEBANON — Sometimes when Sarah Schneider was working as a server at Lou’s Restaurant and Bakery in Hanover, she’d look across the room to her mother, Becky, who was doing the same.

“Every single person would be looking up to her … the expression on their faces … they were just listening to her so intently,” Sarah Schneider said. “She would be standing at the end of the table just telling these stories and everyone at the table would be listening with their mouths open and looking at her like, ‘Oh my God’.”

Rebecca “Becky” Schneider, who worked at Lou’s for more than 40 years, died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on March 22. She was 63.

The Lebanon resident was a fixture at the downtown Hanover eatery. “I tell people I come with the building,” Schneider said in a 2014 Valley News story.

She was beloved by Upper Valley regulars and Dartmouth College students alike.

“There are so many students who became family who would come back and look for her,” Sarah Schneider said. “They all remembered Becky.”

Schneider started working at Lou’s in the late 1970s while she was a senior at Hanover High School and retired in 2021 after being diagnosed with lung cancer. She raised two daughters as a single mother and, later in life helped to raise two of her grandchildren.

Even though she worked long hours, beginning her day in the early morning at Lou’s, she made it a priority to cook for her daughters every night.

“She was very cost effective,” Sarah Schneider said. She’d purchase “whatever was cheap at the grocery store but she would still make it a really great meal.”

When she was 14, Sarah Schneider became her mother’s co-worker. Lou’s needed a host and Becky Schneider volunteered her daughter.

“My mom was like, ‘Hmm, my daughter who is 14 years old who is having very expensive taste in clothing … she saw the opportunity,’ ” Sarah Schneider, now 36, said with a laugh.

Becky Schneider also trained new workers and occasionally had to keep them in line, especially if the boys who worked in the kitchen were joking around too much or said something she didn’t approve of.

“Sometimes my mom would just smack them right upside the head,” Sarah Schneider said.

Her favorite customers weren’t immune from that affection.

“Everyone at the table would laugh so hard and they would leave her an extra tip,” Sarah Schneider said. “Only she could do that.”

And they kept coming back. Sarah Schneider recalled her mother inviting Dartmouth students to their home for dinner when they were feeling homesick or needed an evening away from Hanover.

“She would just be their mother hen,” she said. They’d bring their parents to Lou’s to meet Schneider and in later years, their children.

For the most part, working with her mother was a joy. She learned more about Schneider’s high standards, especially when it came to customer service.

“If something came out and it wasn’t right, she would kindly but sternly be like, ‘Nope, this isn’t right,’ ” Sarah Schneider said. “She passed that down to me, too. We are the front line as servers. If it’s not right, you had to say something.”

Fellow employees took notice and credited Becky Schneider with making them better at their jobs. Zach Plante started working at Lou’s in his early 20s when he was fresh out of culinary school.

“If I was working with people who weren’t afraid to take shortcuts at times, maybe I wouldn’t have questioned them, being kind of green,” said Plante, of Haverhill, who spent about a decade at Lou’s and now works as an electrician. “She didn’t like to let food sit. She understood the importance of the timing.”

He remembered one time she refused to take out a grilled cheese sandwich for one of her tables.

“She accused someone of microwaving it because the bread wasn’t crispy and the cheese wasn’t as melted as it should have been,” Plante said. “She cared so much about it that it helped me to adopt her standards.”

Schneider was also a bit of a diner food traditionalist. When Plante worked to expand the menu with longtime owners Toby and Pattie Fried, who owned Lou’s for about three decades before selling it to Jarett Berke in 2018, Schneider would sometimes question his choices. She raised an eyebrow at overnight oats and the “Cowboy Bowl” (which has a quinoa base).

“She really wasn’t impressed with at first, but they grew on her eventually,” Plante said. “She ended up loving (the Cowboy Bowl) once she finally tried it.”

Working at a busy restaurant can be grueling. It can also be mentally and physically taxing. None of it ever seemed to faze Schneider.

“She was a great friend to everyone she worked with and funny as the day is long,” said Marcy Bartlett, who worked at Lou’s with Schneider for almost 20 years. “We could laugh so hard in the middle of a long hard day and keep the show on the road.”

Schneider also worked the Mother’s Day shift and loved giving out flowers to the mothers who celebrated there. She had a way of rolling with whatever food service threw her way and that inspired confidence among the rest of the staff.

“You quickly learned that she was dedicated to her work, she had an innate skill reading people and situations and she could anticipate what her customers wanted,” Bartlett, of Hartford, said. “She was incredibly gifted.”

Longtime friend and co-worker Ginny Macomber (and Plante’s mother-in-law) remembered one busy day when they were the only two servers working the floor. Occasionally they’d catch each other’s eye and share a moment of laughter.

“We just had to do what we had to do,” Macomber, of Fairlee, said on what would have been Schneider’s 64th birthday, May 7.

Pattie Fried said Schneider was more than a server: She was “an incredible cook” in her own right and she used that knowledge to help customers.

“She could guide customers to the best dishes with the kind of confidence that only comes from truly understanding what’s on the plate. And she didn’t stop there,” Pattie Fried wrote in an email. “Becky was also our go-to proofreader, catching every menu typo before it hit the tables. She cared about the details, the flavors and the people. That’s what made her unforgettable.”

Schneider defined hospitality and helped him learn more about it, Berke said. She remembered what regulars routinely ordered, the names of customers’ kids and doled out hugs. (She had a particular affection for Dartmouth’s men’s crew team members.)

“She authentically cared for people,” Berke wrote in an email. “She was the type of person who would grab you by the arm, ask a question and look deep into your mind while you answered.”

Schneider also helped Berke when he bought the business. He referred to her as “the face of Lou’s,” and they’d have in-depth conversations about how the restaurant was run.

“She was opinionated, but she nudged me in the direction she wanted instead of pushing me,” Berke wrote. “Having her as an ally was one of the reasons that I was successful in taking over the business.”

And when she needed them the most, people showed up for her. After Schneider was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago, her family and friends started a GoFundMe to help her cover expenses that raised more than $60,000 from hundreds of people.

“Because it was Becky and because it was my mom, people just all rallied for her,” Sarah Schneider said.

Schneider was also a devoted friend. Macomber, a former co-worker, has a daughter around the same age as Schneider’s daughters. They bonded over being single mothers and helped each other out. When Macomber’s daughter got married, Schneider helped her prepare the rehearsal dinner. They also made time for fun: The pair went out dancing. Bonnie Raitt’s “Not the Only One” was their song.

“If there was a woman who was my soulmate, it would be Becky,” Macomber said while looking at a blue spinel ring that Schneider gave her. Schneider was a big fan of jewelry, especially rings.

Her family was her focus. She delighted in being a grandmother. Sarah Schneider’s 9-year-old son Wesley Damone, said his favorite thing to do with his grandmother was to bake cookies, especially chocolate chip and Christmas varieties.

“No matter how she was feeling if she was feeling really sick or bad or feeling good, she would always cook for me,” Wesley said. “When I was sick and she was also sick, she would still watch me.”

She also gave him treats only grandmothers could get away with. Sometimes, the pair would walk to Colburn Park to get food and a soda. When Sarah Schneider asked her mom to stop buying her son soda, “She would be like, ‘OK,’ but wouldn’t stop,” Wesley said as Sarah Schneider laughed in the background.

People still stop by Lou’s looking for Schneider. When Sarah Schneider is there, she talks to them about her mother and looks after them the way her mother did.

“Now that she’s not here anymore, they look for me,” Sarah Schneider said. “I love it so much.”

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.