by Pete Jordan
“Whew!” I said, waving my hand before my nose to state the obvious.
“Stinks, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t believe some of this stuff has been sitting here for three days.”
“Three days?!” he scoffed. “I’d say it’s more like a week.”
“Is it always like this?” I asked.
“Nah, a buncha people just quit,” he said. “And now they can’t find anyone else to work down here.”
Except for a sap like me, I thought, who’d traveled hundreds of miles for the job.
“Normally, seven or eight people work the breakfast shift,” Matt said. “And there’s what—three of us?”
Working the skeleton crew in a smelly dungeon was definitely not the reason why this place had topped my To Do list.
When the sink was full with hot, soapy water, I started attacking the pots. My heroic effort lasted less than half an hour before Matt came over and said, “Dude, mellow out.”
He pointed out that even with a full staff, we’d just keep pace with what was coming in. So with only three people on the job, we were going to fall behind regardless of whether we worked hard or not.
“Besides,” he said, “what are they gonna do? Fire us?”
This dishman made my kind of sense. I left the pots and helped myself to some more scrambled eggs.
Matt explained that, while we did wash the plates from the cafeteria upstairs, we were expected to also wash stuff generated from the adjoining kitchen. That’s where most of this came from. Next door they cooked for cafeterias in dorms and buildings all over campus. After the food was trucked over to those places, all the dirty serving trays and hotel pans—complete with leftovers—were returned to our pit.
After my shift, in the afternoon, I tracked down the office of the Memorial Union Labor Organization (MULO)—the union I’d heard so much about and that now included me as a dues-paying member. The office turned out to be only a desk in the corner of the Teaching Assistants’ Association office. No one from MULO was there, so I left a note saying I’d like to talk to someone about the organization’s history. When I told one of the TAs in the room that I was interested in learning about MULO, he showed me decades’ worth of MULO newsletters and welcomed me to borrow them.
For the next few days, I dished mornings and read the newsletters during the evenings. Despite the gigantic amount of cookware and dishes that needed to be cleaned, it may have been the least stressful job I’d ever had. Since no one expected us to clean everything, Matt and Joe and I could work as slowly as we wanted. And whenever another rack of hotel pans was rolled in, we’d break from whatever work we were slowly doing, grab our forks and pore over whatever still-warm breakfast items were on our menu. It was the best Bus Tub Buffet I’d ever attended.
Still, where was all the camaraderie I was reading about in the newsletters? In the 1980s, almost every president and vice president of the four hundred–strong labor organization came from among the dishroom workers despite the dishers’ making up less than 5 percent of the total membership. In that decade, the dishwashers challenged groups of other workers to games of softball and soccer. They even walked off the job once to protest the asbestos-covered pipes right outside the pit.
Reading about the past made me nostalgic for the dishpits of yore. I missed the glory days, even if I’d never experienced them in the first place.
Going back even further through the newsletters, I discovered that the dishwashers had been instrumental in the union’s founding! In fact, the group’s very first president came from the pit. And it was a key, radical act by a dozen or so dish dogs that galvanized support for the fledgling organization.
On Thursday, March 9, 1972, dishwasher/budding-labor-activist Elaine Koplow stopped by the dishpit and found the crew shorthanded. To help out, she clocked in, then dove in. When the kitchen supervisor, Rose Bass, entered and saw Koplow doing some unscheduled dishing, Bass accused the dishwoman of having purposefully clocked in in order to create a disturbance. Koplow denied this. The two then exchanged heated words.
The next morning, a suit entered the dishroom and asked Koplow, “Are you Elaine?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“I’ve heard you’re a damn good little worker,” he said, “and we’re going to take care of you.”
“Then I knew I was fucked,” Koplow later recalled.
He summoned her away from the dishes for a meeting upstairs with management. There, she was falsely accused of having been loud, profane and abusive to Bass. She was also told she lacked a positive attitude. Formally, Koplow was charged with “disrupting normal work activities” and suspended from her job for ten days.
After the meeting, Koplow returned to the basement pit and reported her sentence to her fellow workers. Their response to her was automatic: “If you’re not working, we’re not working!”
Before departing, they posted a sign on the dishroom door.
Afternoon Shift:
Elaine was suspended.
Go to Jerry & Arlette’s house.
The afternoon shift followed the morning shift’s lead; later, the evening shift did the same. Nobody punched in. Nobody worked.
The entire dish staff met that evening. They agreed to remain on strike until Koplow was reinstated to her job. The dishwashers had another agenda in mind as well: to kick-start the stalled negotiations for a labor contract between MULO and the university.
After picketing for a couple days in front of the Memorial Union—carrying signs like “Your Dishes Are Washed by Scabs!”—the pearl divers then called for a boycott. Students and faculty were asked to not patronize any of the building’s units. On a campus that was a hotbed of the late 1960s/early 1970s student activism, a single glance at the picket line was all that was needed to send the sympathetic longhairs in the opposite direction.
For two days, the boycott showed signs of success. Business at the Memorial Union was visibly down. Finding willing subjects to cross the picket line to work as scabs in the dishroom proved so difficult that management personnel had to be pressed into dish duty. But the schmucks couldn’t hack the work. Soon, the few meals that were still being served in the Lakeside Cafeteria were being eaten from paper plates! All the while, the university was losing scads of income as it continued to pay cooks and cashiers to prepare and serve food that went unpurchased and uneaten.
On Thursday night, MULO held a general meeting of its members to discuss the union’s official position on the wildcat strike. An overwhelming majority voted in favor of a resolution that called for the reinstatement of the dishers without any disciplinary action. They also authorized a MULO-wide strike vote.
Less than a week after a lone dishwoman was wrongly disciplined for insubordination, the university now faced losing hundreds of student-workers to the strike—an event that would certainly shut down the entire Memorial Union. Management—who’d all but fired the dishwashers—were now eager to negotiate.
On Friday night, dishroom shop steward Bob Liek met on the Memorial Union’s fourth floor with personnel director Tom Cleary. According to Liek:
Right outside the student union is the library mall and that was the main gathering point for the demonstrations. The anti-war people would meet there before they marched. That particular night, there was a big demonstration scheduled. As we were negotiating, there was a build-up of students in the library mall. Looking out the window, you couldn’t even see the ground from the student union. People were spilling into Langdon Street and up State Street—there were thousands of people there.
I told Cleary, “Look, I can go outside right now and talk to the demonstrators out there and in ten minutes they can come and take this building down brick by brick.”
Now, that wasn’t true at all. They were out there for a demonstration against the war in Vietnam and were definitely not thinking about dishroom workers at the student union or anything like that. But in the university’s paranoid crazed state at that ti
me, that was a critical threat to them. So Cleary hopped on the phone with Chancellor Young and came back and said, “Okay, we’ll meet your demands.”
Koplow and the others were then reinstated to their jobs. The wildcat strike made such a big impression on the building’s other student-workers that, a month later—with negotiations on the labor contract still stalled—more than four hundred MULO members staged a general strike of the Memorial Union. That strike ended with MULO signing its first contract with the university—a labor agreement that would remain in place for decades, right up to my own stint in the dishroom. And it all came together thanks to that walkout by those dozen-odd heroic dish dogs.
One morning, when Matt had the day off and Joe failed to show, I had the pit all to myself. I loaded plates in one end of the conveyor dishmachine and then plodded thirty feet to the other end to unload them. Then I’d plod back to the front to load it again.
Whenever a rack of hotel pans was rolled into the pit, I grabbed my fork and went to see what was for breakfast. After being disappointed by vacant hotel pans each time, I told the next cook who appeared, “I hope that one’s got some grub in it.”
“Nope,” he said. “No more leftovers.”
He explained that the kitchen supervisor had ordered all leftovers to be tossed out before they reached the dishroom. The rotting food was a health hazard.
After I resumed running the dishes through the conveyor machine, another guy walked in and started unloading the dishes from the far end. We worked like this for about ten minutes before he came over and said, “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”
“I have?”
“Yep,” he said. “You left a note on the MULO desk saying you wanted to talk to the president.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I did.”
“Well, I’m Benjamin,” he said. “MULO president.”
Since the golden days of the dishpit had long passed, I was pleasantly stunned to learn that MULO was still headed by a dishman.
He admitted that it was a low point for both the pit and MULO.
“When I first began working down here a few years ago, it was still a happening place,” he said. “Now they can’t convince students to wash dishes.”
As we chatted, another rack rolled in. Benjamin instinctively turned to check it for available eats. I told him about the kitchen supervisor’s edict.
“She can’t do that!” he said. “It’s in our contract. We have a right to those leftovers!”
As soon as he said that, I recalled having read in the old MULO newsletters that the dishroom’s right to leftovers had been negotiated into that very first contract between the labor organization and the university in 1972.
“The dishwashers fought for that right a quarter century ago!” I echoed.
“Well, it’s still in the current contract,” he said.
Ben went straight to the kitchen supervisor’s office. He threatened the kitchen supervisor with filing a grievance. She folded immediately, telling him she’d reverse her decision. Within minutes of her bowing to the pressures of the labor organization’s president, leftovers reappeared in the pit. Benjamin and I continued our conversation while snacking on pancakes and sausages.
If I’d felt nostalgic about yesteryear’s dishroom, now I felt proud. Though the dishpit and MULO were both down on their luck, I was eating free grub, thanks to my predecessors.
When I quit, I felt obligated to honor the memory of those pearl divers who’d passed through that pit before me. So I taped a piece of paper to the front of the Memorial Union. On it, I’d written:
On this spot in March 1972,
fifteen dishwashers fought for workers’ rights
by staging a successful wildcat strike.
And I, for one, thank them.
21
Sure You Can Wear Pants
People asked plenty of questions about my quest. Easily the most popular question was “What will you do when it’s finished?”
Settle down? If I could only find a place that would cure my wanderlust, sure, settling wouldn’t be so bad.
Dish abroad? Well, because my grandparents were born in Ireland, I was eligible to become an Irish citizen, which would enable me to legally live and work in any European Union nation. So, maybe.
Canadian readers wondered if I’d go on to tackle the provinces up north. Seeing more of our northern neighbor was absolutely tempting.
Washington, D.C., readers wondered if I’d ever hit their town. Dishing at the White House sounded interesting. But since I’d failed to gain a security clearance to work as a small-town meter maid years before, the chance seemed awfully slim that I could gain access to the White House dishpit.
And many mainlanders wanted to know if, after the States, I’d then knock out the American territories, like Puerto Rico or Guam. As islands, U.S. territories posed the same problem as Hawaii: no interstate bus service. And since no one ever just happened to say, “Hey, I’m driving out to Hawaii—you wanna tag along?” I always assumed the union’s fiftieth state would end up being #50 on my mission.
I pictured going there and staying with any (or all) of the four Dishwasher fans who’d offered me their couches and land a job at some Waikiki beachfront hotel. Then, one day, mid-shift, when the very last notion struck, I’d give the dishmachine a hearty farewell smooch and yank off my apron. Chin up, I’d march out through the front door and post a handwritten flyer on the building’s façade that would read:
In this building’s dishpit,
Dishwasher Pete completed his quest
to wash dishes in all fifty states.
Reclining on the beach, I’d open a bottle of beer and bask in the pleasure of having finally achieved my goal.
In the meantime, without much chance of just passing through, say, Guam, I gave little thought to bagging the territories. But then an invite arrived for a dish job in the Virgin Islands. The letter described the crystal-blue waters, white-sand beaches and relaxed work environment. The beachside resort gig sounded so cushy and so easygoing that I decided to give the Virgin Islands a shot.
Traveling south to Miami—my departure point to the Caribbean—the farther south I got, the hotter and wetter the air became. By the time I reached New Orleans, the heat and humidity were miserable. The day after I arrived, I went out wandering. When I returned to Cheryl’s house hours later, my T-shirt and pants were drenched in sweat, my neck and arms sunburned. As I whined to Cheryl about the weather, she said, “You think it’s gonna be any cooler in the Caribbean?”
As always, she had a point. My goal suddenly changed—to wear pants all summer without getting drenched.
So the Virgin Islands were scrapped and I set off for Alaska. But first, Oregon, to earn money for the trek farther north.
A couple weeks later, I sat in on a friend’s community radio show. To raise money for the station’s pledge drive, I made his listeners an offer: for a mere $25 pledge, I’d dish in the pledge-maker’s home. Four people took up that offer.
In turn, I received an offer. It was from a fellow Reading Frenzy volunteer whom I’d only recently met. Amy Joy called to pledge twenty bucks for a gift certificate donated by a diner—and then she asked me to help her go spend it.
Free food? Offer accepted!
Days later, I sat in a booth opposite Amy Joy. She wore eyeglasses and her dark hair short. With flowered vines tattooed on her forearms, she looked like an equally sweet and dangerous librarian. In the dark and dreary diner, she shone in a bright orange flowery vintage-store dress.
She was so suspiciously dolled up, I had to wonder, Is this a date? If it was a date with me she sought, then why hadn’t she just pledged five bucks more and had me come dish at her home like the clean-cut yuppie guy the night before had done?
That home-dishwashing session had ended with the dishes clean and the pledge-giver saying, “So…”
“So…what?” I asked.
“So…you wanna spend the night?”
&
nbsp; Through the years, I’d had a lot of guys invite me to spend the night on their couches or floors. But apparently that wasn’t the kind of sleeping arrangement this pledge-giver had in mind. What he was suggesting wasn’t covered by the $25 pledge.
So I decided that if Amy Joy had wanted a date, she would’ve gone for the home-dishwashing angle. Then I ordered a burger and a beer and an ice cream sundae.
When she ordered a soda with her meal, I asked, “You don’t wanna beer?”
“Actually,” she said, blushing somewhat, “I’m not twenty-one.”
Cripes! When she then said she was only nineteen, it was my turn to blush. How could I have suspected that this was a date? No nineteen-year-old could possibly be interested in a bald thirty-year-old fart like me.
Freed from worrying about her motives, I spent the rest of the meal stuffing myself. When I was done, I thanked her for the eats and went on my way.
While I was getting ready to leave for Alaska, my friend Poppy contacted me from California.
“Hey, I’m driving out to Maine,” she said. “You wanna tag along?”
I’d already dished in Maine. Then again, I’d already dished in Alaska. Both states offered good pants-wearing weather. It was a tough call. But Maine won the tie-breaker, if only because it was a newer plan. So I ditched Alaska and I set off for Maine via California.
Auburn, California: the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. While I was waiting for Poppy to get ready for the trip, spring was turning to summer. As the temperature increased, the challenge to ramble around in sweat-free pants mounted. While waiting impatiently to depart, I got a call from my friend Jon. He was working at a summer camp higher up in the Sierra Nevadas. The camp’s teen disher wasn’t cutting it; Jon wanted to know if I wanted the job.
“What’s the climate like up there?” I asked.
“The climate?” he said. “Oh, it’s warm during the day. But at night it gets kinda chilly.”
