DISHWASHER GOES PRO

It's 8:43 a.m., seventy degrees out, partly cloudy. Patrick is licking my breakfast dish.

We ran out of paper plates, so I had to use a china plate to prepare my breakfast salad on. Now this means I'll have to wash it, something I don't want to do.

My first professional dishwashing job was washing dishes by hand after suppers at fellowship hall at the First Methodist Church in Clearwater, Fla. as a teenager, for which they paid me under the table. In college, I was a member of Gamma Theta Chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon, at the University of Florida, the fraternity that was immortalilzed in the classic film "Animal House".I was one of the two dishwashers there. If you washed dinner dishes by hand for Cook you got your meal free.

When I worked as shift manager at Krystal in Clearwater (a White Castle clone) that used china, I must have washed my share of dishes and frying pans, but I have no clear memory of it.)

When I flunked out of Florida, I traveled down to Lido Beach and stayed with a Klan buddy. I got a real job at the Azure Tides Motel kitchen washing pots and pans, the worst thing ever. But you did get a free supper on your shift. (There was no such thing as Teflon in those days.) In short order I worked my way up to Dishwasher, and then dishwasher Prep guy-- My job was to receive the plastic tubs of dirty dishes and silverware from the busboys, and spray them off with a shower hose thing to prewash them before they went into the dishwasher. On Easter Sunday morning, in April of 1969, I personally washed over 1,000 brunch dishes, forks, spoons knives and glasses, my personal best as a Pro Dish Washer.

Anad of course my last cherished memory of dish washing occurred in 1971, KP duty at a Ft. Lewis Washington Mess Hall...

-30-