I’m a professional dishwasher, but my road to that pinnacle of success wasn’t easy. When my two next oldest brothers and I were very young, Dad and Mother made a chart giving us daily dishwashing assignments for each meal. One boy was assigned to wash and one to dry. We were paid a pittance for our work. Dad paid us ten cents an hour for doing other jobs.
Mrs. Blanchard, our next-door neighbor, paid me a quarter for helping to do her laundry. That was my first job outside our family, and I was able to save $1.25 to buy a truck I wanted. When I was eight or nine, Blanchards hired me to babysit their children when they went out. I slept at their house on the theory that if something went wrong I would call my parents. I received a dollar for doing that, really big money for me in those days.
I got my first job that the IRS was aware of in the summer of 1952 when I was fourteen. I was hired as a dishwasher at the Pioneer Restaurant, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Keller, for the grand sum of fifty cents an hour. Later, they reduced my pay to forty cents an hour with the excuse that they paid the waitresses that amount. I failed to point out that the waitresses received tips. My negotiating skills left a lot to be desired.
There were good things about working at the restaurant. I drank soda pop, which rotted my teeth, and it had a jukebox. One of the songs was “Auf Wiedersehen,” sung by Vera Lynn. When my Little League baseball team had won the league playoffs two years before, we had been treated to dinner at the Auf Wiedersehen Restaurant where the Kellers had worked at that time. I thought that was why the song was on the jukebox. The Auf Wiedersehen subsequently burned down.
I was no great shakes as a dishwasher in those days. I flunked other assignments at the restaurant such as mopping floors and arranging canned goods on the shelves where they were stored. The Kellers laid me off, and I went on vacation with my family. Late in the summer they hired me back for a number of days, but they still paid me forty cents an hour.
The next summer I thought it would be cool to work at the motel next door to the restaurant, owned by Joe Keller’s brothers. I sealed my own fate when I told them I had earned forty cents an hour at the restaurant. It was never clear what my job was and I didn’t like the brothers very much. I spent a lot of time hiding in the rooms and reading what passed for girly magazines in those days. When one of them called me and told me I didn’t have to come to work anymore I was ecstatic. During the rest of that summer I worked part-time digging ditches for a friend of my father, but at least it paid a dollar an hour.
The following summer I came into my own as a dishwasher. I went to work at the Chestnut Hollow Restaurant, owned by Sal Ezzo, for seventy cents an hour. I worked the evening shift and enjoyed the job. I didn’t even mind working in the kitchen when the temperature there was over a hundred degrees. Mr. Ezzo said I was the best dishwasher he’d ever had, and then added that I wasn’t supposed to hear him say it. The waitresses were nice. One of them told me I’d be a knockout in ten years when I was twenty-six. Well, at least my wife, Bonny, fell for me because that’s when we got married.
In college I worked as a busboy and dishwasher in a dormitory for several years. The pay started at eighty cents an hour and went higher based on hours worked. The trick to bussing the large oval trays full of dirty dishes was to place one hand directly under the center of gravity of the tray and balance it on one’s shoulder. The other hand was free to open the door into the kitchen. Some of the busboys never caught on to this, and they were applauded by the diners when the noise of the crash of a dropped tray filled the dining room.
After Bonny and I got married we moved into a brand new apartment and divided up the work. She hated washing dishes (she’d sometimes hid dirty pots and pans when she was young), so she agreed to do the cooking, even though she didn’t know much about it, and I took over dishwashing responsibilities.
Our son, Andy, followed in my footsteps. While in high school he got a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Palos Verdes where we lived. He even did some bussing and received tips. He went on to greater things when that restaurant folded, working in a pet store cleaning out animal cages.
Bonny and I still have the same arrangement in the kitchen and she is now a great cook.
Your hands must've been very clean! My jobs tended to be outdoors and dirty. One of my younger brothers who stayed with me his freshman year in college became a busboy at a local wealthy country club. My twin brother washed eggs by machine in college. I always washed my own dishes until I got a dishwasher.
Ron