Elks Club

My first job was busboy in the Elks Club restaurant in Cedar Rapids Iowa. I think that was the summer of 1968 before I entered my junior year in high school. Though I was 16 at the time, I had no idea what was expected of me. The waitresses were surly and provided no instruction, so when the dishwasher’s position opened up after the first week, I grabbed it. I made one dollar an hour washing dishes. It was hard work, and oftentimes disgusting, but it was straightforward and it suited me at the time.

There were several hours of work during lunch followed by 2-3 UNPAID hours off before dinner hours began. I couldn’t go do much during the two hours, so I just hung around the kitchen. The restaurant and the bar stayed open pretty late, so I’d get home from work after midnight. It was a pretty long day since work began before lunch. The job gave me a reason to study hard in school. I didn’t want to wash dishes for the rest of my life.

They would feed me back in the kitchen before work began, and the food was excellent, but they took the meal out of my paycheck. I needed to save every penny for college, so I started bringing a sandwich to work. It was pretty funny to bring my lunch and dinner to work in a restaurant.

Occasionally the kitchen manager needed to inventory the boxes of food and supplies in the large storage room off of the kitchen. She complained about how difficult the inventory was and how she dreaded it. I was looking for an opportunity to do anything other than washing dishes, so I volunteered to help with the job.

When we got in the storage room the boxes of supplies were neatly stacked on the floor with walkways between the stacks. The kitchen manager explained that we needed to un-stack each pile of boxes so that we could count each box individually. I was aghast, but kept it to myself. She was the boss, but I gently suggested that I had learned something in school that might make the process go quicker with much less labor. I didn’t tell her I learned it in elementary school.

I explained that if the boxes inside each stack were the same as the boxes on the outside of the stack, I could multiply the boxes wide, times the boxes deep, times the boxes high, and have a total without moving a single box. “You can do that?” she said in shock. I assured her I could do this quickly and with accuracy if provided with a piece of paper and a pencil to multiply the bigger numbers. (Hand held calculators did not exist at that time.) We accomplished the inventory in record time and I became the hero of the entire kitchen. What I had performed was nothing short of miraculous to the entire staff. That’s what happens when you pay attention in the sixth grade.