Confessions of a fast food purveyor

With fast food under attack, I cannot help but feel some responsibility for the blight. Yes, in the mid-60s, I played a role in advancing its cause and am coming clean about it.

It was the end of my senior year in high school and I was on the cusp of having to finance a college education. My job at an auto parts store was winding down and I needed additional income. So, I took a job at Gino’s.

That was an east coast burger chain. In addition to burgers, we carried the KFC franchise.

A newbie, I drew the worst shift, four to close. While close could be midnight or one, depending upon the day, you were there long after the sign was turned off for an extensive cleanup. That was a messy and arduous task. Coupled with the dinnertime rush, this was not the desirable tour of duty.

It was different back then. You had to have the menu and prices memorized so you could ring up orders quickly. Also, you needed the ability to make change, God forbid.

The employee pool was almost all teenage guys. In our case, it was understandable. In an inner city location, only the swift and strong would survive. Attacks by irate customers and gang clashes enveloping the facility weren’t infrequent.

When I started there, the layout was the original walk-up design. That is, there was no eat-in area. You walked up to the windows and ordered to-go.

But, as McDonald’s or whoever initiated the “glass cube,” we modified our building. While this is now commonplace, it was a new concept at the time. The first couple weeks, we had to use masking tape to put big Xs on the windows to make them noticeable. People were walking into and through them.

The construction once provided an unanticipated mode of communication. Approaching busy times, we built up inventory of some items; burgers in the heater box and shakes in the freezer. One night, the shake man had allotted too much lead time. An unhappy customer returned to the window with his shake and a two-by-four he had picked up in the construction area. Without a word, he used the shake to drive a nail into the board. Point taken.

While most of us were callow teens, George was a lifer. That is, he was around 25, an anomaly among us at the time. What kind of guy did this at that age when there were good factory jobs around? George did most of the chicken frying. One night, someone asked him for the time. He turned his wrist to check it. It was the wrist that held a pot of scalding fat. They had to take him to the hospital.

I was called off the bench (or the window) to make chicken. You dumped raw chicken parts into a tub of beaten eggs. Then, you transferred them to a tub of the Colonel’s mixture of flour and the secret herbs and spices, and tossed it around. I’m guessing one of the secret ingredients was pepper, because that induced sneezing. And, obviated the need for the egg mixture, if you must know the truth. I haven’t eaten fried chicken since then.

Another one of the dirty secrets was what happened to the leftover chicken. During cleanup, you stripped the meat and dumped it into a pot in the heater box. It contained meat from prior days, along with barbeque sauce. It was the pork barbeque for succeeding days. How long that witch’s brew fermented, I couldn’t tell you. I never knew it to be cleaned out, just added to. There were probably prehistoric bird parts at the bottom. Kind of the La Brea Tar Pits of fast food.

Rush hours brought on tension and short tempers. We applied condiments to buns with caulking guns. They were the weapons of choice in settling our issues. After the hectic dinner hour, it wouldn’t be unusual for a window man to greet you covered with stains of special sauce or catsup.

The managers were old guys. Some of them as advanced as their doddering thirties. Sentenced to a life of corralling feral teens, their attitudes were generally grim resignation. Bud was the exception.

He had recently mustered out of the Marines and was over-the-top and all full of false bravado. Bud was extremely dismayed by our failure to be impressed by the hourly accounts of his exploits in a stateside motor pool. He was unable to distinguish between his changing oil and others raising the flag at Iwo Jima. We had signed on to make a lousy buck an hour, not take a course in pseudo-macho for the inadequate. We didn’t need his theatrics or abuse. He provoked the fast food version of fragging.

One night, Bud had ridden Nick particularly hard. Not a good move, since Nick was already "apprenticing" in collecting high-interest/short-term loans. During cleanup, Nick went into the basement and broke the valve on a large tank of bug spray. The roaches were plentiful and robust, and not to be trifled with. We needed the heavy ordnance.

Nick quickly came up and told Bud that something was wrong in the basement. Bud called him a few choice names, as was his custom, and descended the steps. George locked the door behind him. Bud whipsawed George on a daily basis.

The opening crew found him the next day. He was alive, but a little green around the gills. Not as roach-like as we thought. We never saw him again.

Who we did see, on occasion, was Gino. That was Gino Marchetti, whose name we bore. Gino was at the end of his legendary career as a defensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts. He and Alan Ameche (another Colt) started Gino’s and built it up to over 300 units. It was later purchased by Marriott and became Roy Rogers.

Gino was huge, especially by the standards of those days. He would show up unannounced and stomp around inspecting things with little more than a grunt or two. Sometimes, he’s thrust a mammoth paw into the fry tray and stuff a wad into his maw. A charmer.

Our odd hours tended to separate us from family and friends, drawing us closer together. We’d work to the wee hours of the morning and then go out to play after work. It was my first exposure to the “night people.”

It’s a term I would recognize much later in the field of mental health. People afflicted with some forms of mental illness tend to stay up late and sleep late. Now, many spend their nights on the internet (find an acrimonious posting in a chat room or social networking site and chances are good the time stamp is after midnight). Back then, it was on the streets, where we’d encounter them.

It was a whole other world out there that most people didn’t know about. And, could sleep better for not knowing. The city was somewhat like the mutant section of town in “Total Recall” at those hours and we had many weird adventures. Fodder for another blog.

The chain grew quickly and they were strapped for resources. I was among those tapped to do training for opening new stores. There was the standard procedure stuff, but I tried to add the practical. I recall one of my first assignments in Allentown (PA). I advised the new window recruits to dive into the stainless steel shelves under the counter when a gang fight broke out for protection against stray bullets. They stared at me blankly. Allentown wasn’t Philly.

The end of the summer approached and I prepared to go off to college. The district manager showed up one day and the store manager asked me to join them in his office. They wanted me to go into the management training program. I politely declined, saying that I was on an engineering career path (subject for another blog). I can look back and know that I left the door open for Dave Thomas. Hope he was grateful.

So yes, I shoulder some of the blame for the porkier profile of the average American. But, a lot of lessons learned and experiences that can’t be duplicated.