Doing the Dishes

Yesterday, for no reason at all that I can determine, I started thinking about washing dishes.  I used to do it all the time.

I didn't work my way through college (The University of Texas at Austin), but I did earn most of my meals by washing dishes at a boarding house run by Mrs. A. B. Cryer.  I never knew her first name and never called her anything but Mrs. Cryer, and I never knew her husband's name, either.  He was Mr. Cryer.  You'd think I might have been curious, considering that my actual name and initals make me Mr. A. B. Crider.  There's a nice little similarity and rhyme going on there.  But in those days, I wasn't even curious.  Surely I heard his wife refer to him by name once or twice.  Alfred?  I don't remember.

I was a little curious about Mr. Cryer's job, if not about his name.  I never knew what the job was, exactly, but I saw him on campus all the time.  Before eight o'clock in the mornings, as students began heading into the buildings for the first class of the day, Mr. Cryer could be seen standing by one of the front doors to Sutton Hall, which I always thought of as the history building.  He'd be greeting the students as if he were an official representative of the Department of History, although I think he was on the janitorial staff.

But I digress.  Back to the boarding house.  A good friend of mine, Bob Tyus (or the Big T as we sometimes called him) got a job as the head waiter at Mrs. Cryer's.  He didn't do any waiting, however.  He was more like the greeter, and it was his job to know everyone who ate there.  If you hadn't paid for your meals (I believe the price was $36 a month for lunch and dinner; no dinner on Saturdays, and no meals on Sundays), you weren't seated.  If you got past Bob, he might point you to a table, or he might hold you in the entrance way if the tables were all full, which wasn't unusual.  Bob's the one who told me and my roommate, Walter Funk, that there were some openings for dishwashers.  Wash dishes for an hour, get a free meal.  Simple as that.  Seemed like a good deal, so Walter and I became dishwashers.

The dishwashing room was in  the back of the house.  There were three connected metal sinks lined up in front of the windows.  The first sink was for washing, the second was for rinsing, and the third was for sterilizing.  Usually two people worked the sinks, sometimes three.  We really needed three at the peak times, but it didn't always work out that way.

The dishes and utensils were stacked on a counter beside the first sink, and the dishwasher was supposed to take a dish, wash it, and put into a basket that sat in the rinse water.  When the basket was full, the second man would shake it around a little, take it out of the rinse water, and put it in the sterilizing sink. That one had a fire under it and the water was often close to boiling.  After a little while, the guy would take the basket out, tilt it to drain off the water, wait a few minutes, dry the plates, and then stack them on a table behind him.  The utensils were passed along the same way.

When the house was crowed, some of those steps got short shrift.  The dishwasher might take a whole stack of plates into the sink, swish them round, and transfer the stack to the rinse.  Nobody ever got sick, though, as far as I know.

I can still picture and hear a waiter named Enrique, who was from Argentina.  He'd come back into the room yelling "Spoons!  I need spoons!"  We were always in a rush.

The person who stacked the plates on the counter before they got washed was known to everyone as "Sister." I don't know her name, but she was the sister of one of the cooks, Lela.  Sister would scrape the food off the plates into a big garbage can, except for the good scraps, which she kept "for my puppy."  When the garbage can was full, we dishwashers would haul it outside and bring in an empty one.

On our shift, Walter and I would occasionally sing, beautifully of course.  We sang the John H. Reagan High School alma mater (Walter was a grad) and other great tunes.  We sometimes got to sing as many as two before Mrs. Cryer came back to tell us that the "boys" were complaining and that we'd have to stop.

Mrs. Cryer was often the victim of pranks.  About once a month she'd wander through the rooms were her boys were eating, saying, "There's a phone call for Dick Stroker. Is Dick Stroker here?"  Once someone made a really nice sign for the front yard: "Cryer's Boarding House. You can't beat our meat!"  It stayed for several days.  It didn't take much to entertain college kids in those days.

Sometimes I'd wash, and sometimes I'd rinse and scald.  By the time I went home in the spring, I'd have the worst case of dishpan hands you can imagine.  They were red and chapped and cracked.  Mrs. Cryer probably used cheap detergent.  One year I tried using rubber gloves, but the sink was deep, and the soapy water would slosh over the tops of the gloves and stay in them for the whole hour of washing.  That wasn't good for my dishpan hands at all, so the gloves got discarded.

I don't remember much about the food, other than that there were a few things I refused to eat.  That was okay.  As a dishwasher, I had kitchen privileges, so I could make myself a peanut butter sandwich.  And there were always mashed potatoes at every meal. I could eat those.  Another privilege of the dishwashers was extra desserts.  I liked the cobbler.

And that's what I have to say about doing the dishes.