When Charlotte Harding finished her coffee Monday morning, she folded the pink sweetener packet into her paper napkin and tucked them into the empty mug.

Dining out, the 62-year-old Bangor native, like other former waitresses, can’t help but stack dishes and wipe up stray crumbs in empathetic reflex. For Charlotte, that habit goes back to 1956, when she was just 13, a spitfire, tall and resolute, waiting tables to support a family of two sisters and two brothers left fatherless.

The industrious girl bounced around the city from cafe to cafe and then happened upon Miller’s Restaurant in 1958. She lied about her age, was hired and stayed there for 40 years, the longest of any wait staff at the eatery that would become an internationally known institution of the Queen City.

“I’d have kept working till I couldn’t walk anymore,” the 6-foot-1-inch-tall women declared.

Believe it.

A year and a half before her 1998 retirement, the mother of two took a hard fall on the ice, but kept working. She slipped on an icy patch on the corner of Third and Larkin streets while walking to work. Charlotte’s back was hurt so badly that she had to undergo three operations. But she kept on waitressing.

“I wasn’t the same person,” she said. “I was angrier, bitter, rude a lot. I was in terrible pain. I would go home, walk up three or four steps, and then stop and cry. It just hurt so bad.”

She finally retired at age 55 when a doctor told her that if she kept up her rigorous schedule, she would be confined to a wheelchair before long.

But flash back three decades, when Miller’s was open 24 hours a day, and you’ll find a twentysomething Charlotte thriving in her element.

Find the young woman with dark auburn hair sitting in a snowbank in the middle of the night, tossed there by two men from Dow Air Force Base for having the gall to break up their drunken fistfight right outside the restaurant.

Find her making mischief with co-workers, making calls over Miller’s intercom and laughing as restaurant owner Sonny Miller would search high and low for them like a father humoring rambunctious daughters.

Find her before a party of six tourists who were so charmed by her spicy wit that they invited her to cross the border with them to go deep-sea fishing in their native Nova Scotia.

“She knew how to stir up some trouble and make a ruckus,” recalled Ruth Kennedy, a Miller’s waitress who worked with Charlotte for 18 years. “People still come in and ask about her, out-of-staters.”

“I used to raise the holy devil with my customers,” Charlotte said. “I could tell just by the way they acted whether I could joke with them or had to be prim and proper.”

If she felt comfortable enough with a party, she would waltz around tables with a tray of desserts on her shoulder. And if she did, tables of rowdy high school students or eager Canadians would revel in her moxie and ask for a picture.

That moxie, she said, sometimes led to swearing or ranting, and it seemed that whenever she slipped up, there was “Boss Man” right behind her.

“I was forever being told, ‘Take a chill pill, Charlotte,'” she said, chuckling. “I never knew when to keep my trap shut.”

At the end of the day, Charlotte would walk a mile home, crack open a cold beer, light a cigarette, take her shoes off, prop her feet up, and promptly fall asleep in her recliner. Or sometimes in the bathtub. Her exhaustion was so great that when the Millers threw her retirement party, she asked for a new bed.

Seven years later, it was a former co-worker who broke the news to Charlotte that the institution would close this weekend. Her “home away from home” was being sold to make room for a new racino.

“I almost fell through the floor,” she said. “I never thought it would close in my lifetime. It don’t seem right.”

Charlotte, whose arms are muscular and whose focus is still sharp as a tack, remembers most all of the restaurant’s milestones, from celebrity visits by Walter Mondale, George Mitchell, Edmund Muskie, Drew Barrymore and popular wrestlers, to the restaurant fire in 1963, which forced Miller to move the operation from Dutton Street to the Main Street location.

“There was a mix of snow and rain,” she remembered. “We stood outside. That was the first time I saw Sonny cry. He threw up his arms and said, ‘There she goes.’

“You could see the balls of fire through the windows. It was so hot, it melted the payphone. It melted money on some of the tables. There was a five-dollar bill on one of the tables, and you could just [blow on it] and it was gone.”

Charlotte saw the restaurant through the shift in management when Sonny Miller handed the business over to his son John, and she saw the family through the deaths of Sonny’s parents and the births of Sonny’s children.

Likewise, Sonny saw to it that Charlotte had enough money to go through two pregnancies, and he cared for her after she was attacked one night walking home from work. “Whenever I needed him, he was there for me,” she said. “There were a couple years my kids wouldn’t have had a Christmas if not for him.”

The bond between John and Charlotte was strong, too. “I used to lug John on my shoulders,” said Charlotte. She worked at his wedding and made him piggy banks in a weekly ceramics class, which he still keeps at his home.

“Let me tell you something,” said John. “They just don’t make them like Charlotte anymore.”

“Thank God for that,” Charlotte said, laughing.

Since she retired, Charlotte hasn’t been a regular at Miller’s. She has an open invitation to eat there whenever she wants for free, but she sees that as taking advantage of them. She has been spending her time at the Bangor House, calling at bingo games, volunteering and helping serve coffee, doughnuts and muffins at the house’s weekly breakfasts.

She has had repeated bouts of sickness, including problems with her eyesight and complications from diabetes.

But she still sees some of her old pals, and she often lies awake at night lingering over the memories of 40 years growing up from girl to woman within the walls of this family institution.

“[Miller’s patrons] are going to miss this place, without a doubt. There are so many restaurants, but they’re all fast food. [The Millers] will find a place. You wait and see. John will open another place. I know he will. … And all his crew here will go right back to him.”