WWII - My First Job

In a previous post, I said that I spent about six months with my husband, during his stateside training, before he left for Europe. This was in the small Texas town of Gainesville, while Melvin was stationed in Camp Howze. As in many other areas, a lot of the young men, and some young women, were serving in the armed forces. Many of those who were not in the service, but able to work, had gone to larger cities for war work and other better paying jobs, leaving a gap in available workers to do whatever local jobs there were. We had a tiny apartment in a group of small apartments, along with several other service men and their wives. I became good friends with one of the wives. She wanted to earn a little money [we all had barely enough to scrape by] and found a job as a kitchen helper in a hospital across town that someone had told her about. When she accepted the job, she found out about another job that she thought would work for me, and recommended me. This was in another smaller, private hospital, a short distance from where we lived. The person she talked to called the manager at the second hospital, and she called, asking me if I would come in for an interview. This was to be a temporary fill-in job: Though if you were a service wife, all jobs were temporary in a sense, once the service man was re-assigned. What the hospital manager wanted me to do was fill in for her for the two weeks the cook was on vacation. Otherwise the manager would have to do the cooking herself until the cook returned from vacation. You really have to be desperate to pull in a very young woman, with almost no cooking experience to fill in for you. We had only been married two months when my husband left for the army. Before marriage, my cooking at home had been practically nil. I was allowed to set the table and do clean up afterward, but my older sister was my mother’s preferred and only kitchen aid. My duties would be: arrive at five a.m., prepare breakfast, set up the trays for the nurses to deliver, unload the trays when returned, put the dishes and silverware in the sterilizer, and clean up the kitchen afterward. By then, it was time to start getting lunch ready. The same procedure as earlier, just different food. Once the clean-up from lunch was finished, I got a couple of hours off, when I went home and collapsed until time to go back again and repeat everything for the evening meal. I felt this job was way beyond my capabilities, besides being a heck of a lot of work, and tried to make the manager see that. But she apparently was h___ bent on getting this job off her hands for the next two weeks. She was too much for me. I told her I didn’t know all that much about cooking. Her answer was, “Neither do I,” as she picked up a cook book, handed it to me and said, “Well, you can read, can’t you.” What came next scared me even more when I found out I not only had to cook, but had to plan the menus and order the food each morning! Those two weeks were the longest two weeks of my life. When it was over, the manager thanked me and said I had done well. Then I found out the manager also had to cook every Thursday on the cook’s one weekday off. the manager called and wanted me to do the Thursday stint too. Yeah! Sure! I lost the first round, but I learned a whole lot about not letting someone convince me to do something I really, really did not want to do. I didn’t want to repeat that performance even one day a week. I steadfastly refused to go to the hospital and talk to her, though she called several times before finally giving up. I got a really big, “dig in your heels” lesson fairly early in life. A cook book saved my life so to speak. That’s how I learned to cook, the same way I have learned many other things since – from a book.