THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 31, 1994 TAG: 9410310055
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
Washing dishes by hand is fast becoming a lost art.
The advent of the dishwashing machine in the early 1930s started the decline of the manual art, and the post-World War II super-duper washers and dryers hastened it.
Why, if you have an expensive washer, you give a dirty platter only a swipe and the jet stream scours it clean. You'd best check behind less costly machines for tiny residues left on the crockery.
But next to the electric light, dish and clothes washers are the 20th century's greatest inventions. Spacecraft don't stack up against machines that freed women from drudgery at sink and washtub.
That liberation assured them time to unite and march for equal rights and other just causes. Man walking on the moon was nothing to women walking out of the kitchen.
But when machines took over, couples no longer had quiet moments chatting as one washed the dishes and the other dried. You put your motions with the dishes on automatic drive while your minds free-wheeled over the day.
It is not generally known, but I was one of the world's great dishwashers - still am after a holiday feast. I take over at the taps.
I owe my skills to a nasty-tempered KP pusher called Ornery, but not to his face. Every World War II mess hall had a pusher who made sure no man loafed at whatever job he was assigned.
If the pusher wasn't wrathful, he soon formed that habit bossing around men, few of whom felt they were serving their country with distinction by washing dishes, mopping floors or cleaning grease traps.
Once, our outfit pulled 60 straight days of kitchen police. We had finished training and while the Army pondered where to send us, it put us on perpetual KP. All the GIs had it, save Sgt. Maypop, who stood between us and the pusher when that mad monitor seemed about to commit mayhem. ``Don't yers mind, men,'' Maypop said. ``When yers gets out yers can get a job in any kitchen in the country.''
That was Maypop for you - sunny-side up no matter which way the eggs were turned.
Pots and pans were especially daunting. They just kept coming, an endless assembly line.
The cooks fancied themselves chefs, and with so much manpower at their bidding, if they made the merest mistake, instead of rinsing the pot, they flung it at the KP to scour again. The two of us frenzied slaveys, no matter how fast we moved, were behind.
And fell further back, when Ornery stopped to check our handiwork. He would select a pot from the leaning, towering pile, run his index finger over its shining interior, and, if in passing, he felt the tiniest well-nigh microscopic fleck, he would order us to wash it again.
Not just the guilty pot but the entire pile that we had done. Which explains why, on Thanksgiving, before the final hot rinse, I run an index finger around the inside of the pot. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing
by CNB