A dollar and a hamburger a day

It always seemed I ended up with a fry cooking job. It started in high school, quite by accident. A friend had the fry cooking job at The Oasis in Palouse, one of three restaurants in town at the time. One of the owners, Ellen, asked me if I would come in and help out for the evening. I would be washing dishes and peeling spuds for 50 cents an hour while she filled in as fry cook.

My friend didn’t show for the second night and Ellen asked if I would like the job.

I said yes and she assured me that she would stay with me until I was ready to go it alone. The spud peeling and dishwashing was part of the deal.

Ellen, true to her word, was at my side for a while until I was comfortable. This was at the start of my junior year. I had no idea what I was getting myself in for.

Friday nights were busy and Saturday nights were overwhelming. On Saturday nights the farmers came to town. They all wanted to eat out and at night the taverns provided another layer of hungry people. I would come in early to peel potatoes for the French fries. So I still had spuds and dishes to worry about.

This went on through my senior year. Ellen was like having another mother and would help if I needed it.

Later, I spent four years at Potlatch Forests learning how to grade lumber and was offered a job doing that at Lincoln Lumber Company down at Lincoln on the Columbia River. That’s how I got acquainted with this area. I did that until Bill Bell hired me to open the Billy burger for him. Some members of his family would drop in and help. My Oasis experience was helpful, but it was another patty cooking job.

A couple of years later I had saved enough money and we headed off to Nampa, Idaho, for college.

That required that I find some part-time jobs.

Wouldn’t you know it, one of them was cooking hamburgers at an Arctic Circle across the street from Nampa High School, a school with about 1,800 students. They released students on a staggered schedule. We were swamped for two hours.

We had a huge grill, and I would fill it with patties and then fill it again.

I got 50 cents an hour, so it was a dollar a day and the scrooge owner let me have one hamburger. Cooking never carried over to my private life.

I did this for about a year and the pull of lumber grading was too strong. I went back to that, this time in Grand Coulee.