I used to hate washing dishes. Since there were four kids in our family and four weeks in a month, each kid had to wash dinner dishes for a week out of the month. I washed dishes the last week of the month. Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Christmas fall on the last week of the month.

Remember, this was before the dishwasher was a regular appliance built into the kitchen. Later, we had a portable dishwasher, but you still had to wash the dishes first or they would never get clean.

The regular dishes weren’t so bad. Do the glasses first, then the plates, then the silverware. But then the pots and pans were left. They had to be scrubbed. 3M had not made their green sponges with a scraper pad on one side. There was no ScrubDaddy. But there was SOS and Brillo pads. These were balls of steel wool with soap embedded into them. And these were the only tools available to scrub pots.

Pans used to roast things were the worst of all. The food was baked on, and usually there was a black glob of goo in the corners that you had to work out with your fingers. The steel wool was not flexible, so it was really difficult to get them clean.

So, what job did I get to be my first job where I could earn real money that was all mine? Dishwasher! At a Carrow’s Restaurant. Carrow’s was known for their slow-cooked ribs. And guess what?! They slow-cooked the ribs on roasting pans.

Now, you think that a professional restaurant would have professional tools for cleaning roasting pans. Well, it turned out that the professional tool was an SOS steel wool pad embedded with soap – the same thing I used at home. Glasses, plates, and silver went into a professional dishwasher that spewed water and steam and heated the kitchen to about 90 degrees. But pots and pans were stacked into a huge steel sink and hand-scrubbed. And they had to be really clean because food that was served to the paying public was cooked on them. Yep, the chore I hated the most at home was now the first job I had to provide my source of income. That income was minimum wage: in 1971, minimum wage was 95 cents per hour – after taxes it was about 60 cents – a penny a minute to scrub pans.

I worked there the summer of 1971… the greatest summer of all time!

(Pictured: High school graduation picture, 1971. My skin was never this clear.)