Doing Dishes

      From 1940, when my parents were married, until 1952 when our youngest sibling, a sister, was born, my mother was the sole female of the house.  We boys were pressed into domestic service, whether by design or default.

    That is to say, we learned to do dishes, help with laundry and do some house-cleaning chores.  By the time I was old enough to handle laundry, we got our first automatic clothes-washer, a used Hotpoint washer and dryer from the International dealer in town.  It took away a lot of work such as rearranging the kitchen, moving the washing machine from porch to kitchen, and especially handling the heavy rinse tubs.  Mondays were a little less onerous.  I never helped much with laundry as a result of that purchase.

     There was no dishwasher yet.  We boys often did the dishes, especially in the evening. 

     Dish doing involved three jobs, clearing the table, washing, and drying.  “Clearing” was the most desirable or least dreaded.  Put away leftover food, the staples (bread in bread drawer, salt, pepper, sugar bowl shelved, butter stowed in refrigerator), scrape scraps from plates into dog’s dish, stack plates, silverware, glasses near the kitchen sink.  Clearing was finished when the tablecloth had been wiped down with the sponge or dishrag.

     The worst job was washing.  It also bore the most responsibility.  The dishwasher was responsible for getting everything clean, rinsed, and into the dish-drainer.  At the onset of the job, the water was hot, scalding hot.

     Miss Manners (or some such self-appointed authority) says you wash the things that touch the mouth first while the water is hot and fresh.  That would be the silverware and the glasses.  The silverware always went into the water first, but it generally came out last.  That way it had a chance to soak away the hard to get stuff, like egg yolk in the fork tines.  The silverware took the most time.

     The dish dryer took stuff out of the drainer, toweled it dry, and shelved it appropriately.  He was also quality control.  If a plate or fork came through unclean, splash, back into the dishwater it went.  If the washer got a little wet, served him right for not doing the job right the first time.  Again, the silverware took the most time and care.

     Worse than silverware was the separator.  We milked a couple of cows for quite a few years.  Before the family got so big, the folks hauled a can of cream to town once or twice a month, but later, we used everything the two cows produced.  Still, we separated the cream from the milk.  We drank the skim milk, put it on cereal, and used it for cooking and baking.  The cream topped off cereal, bananas, strawberries, pies, cakes, sugared bread, whatever.

      The separator had to be cleaned daily, especially in summer, or the cream and the milk got a rancid flavor.  Dad cleaned the separator bowl outside, but the two spouts and the disk mechanism came into the house and got stacked in line with the rest of the dirty dishes.  The disk mechanism looked like a funnel, but it was heavy, full of lampshade-shaped disks.  There were probably fifteen of them and they were graduated in size, thus the funnel shape. They had to be reassembled in the correct order.  It behooved the dishwasher and dryer to keep the order as well as possible during the cleansing operation. 

      The oily cream clung to the stainless steel.  Each disk had to be gone over separately with rag or sponge, no splashing the disk back and forth in the soapy water to get it clean.

      We had three meals in those days, mostly on a strict schedule.  Breakfast. Dinner (12 noon sharp or beware the consequences if you were late to the table), and supper, less regimented unless we had somewhere to go in the evening.  We nearly always did the supper dishes, getting relief from the parents only if we had a school function to attend.

       As a sidelight of our domestic chores, we learned a marvelous life-coping skill—turn the worst jobs into a game.  In the basement was an old makeshift ping-pong table.  Many a summer night, we all pitched in to clear the table, while somebody ran the dishwater and put the silver and the plates to soak. 

     Below stairs we went and the Ping Pong tournament began.  One person would begin washing the dishes while the other two vied at the Ping Pong table.  When the score reached 21, a dejected, defeated player made his way up the stairs to the sink and drainer.  The first dishwasher could hear as the players kept score and was ready, paddle in hand to try to dispatch the game winner to the kitchen as soon as the first game was over. 

     So it went until the dishes were done.  Lucky was the person who stayed downstairs by virtue of defeating the other contestants.  It seemed a fair way of dividing the dish-doing chores. 

     The tournament usually went beyond the time it took to do the dishes.  Often as not, the Denver Bears were playing baseball on the radio.  In later days, a pool table replaced the rickety Ping Pong table, and eight ball was the game, but the pool table was often converted to Ping Pong with a sheet of plywood.

     Finding a way to make a game out of chores proved useful in my teaching career.  Finding a way to make a dour subject a game made an hour fly by.  Sometimes, they actually learned something, too.

      Time went by.  The kids left the nest one-by-one.  A dishwasher found itself in the farm kitchen.  It’s been a while since a Ping Pong ball bounced off the cement floor, or “My serve” or “Seven all” has echoed through the old basement.   

      The automatic dishwasher is gone, removed for a stalled floor project.   The dish drainer is out and the kitchen sink once again hosts hot soapy water.  It may be my imagination, but I think the dishes are cleaner using the old way.

     Ping Pong, anyone?