Vol. 18, No. 38	Aug. 5, 1999

Working at 99° in the shade

You might say Will Harris cleaned up when he was a kid. No, he didn't make a killing in the stock market at 12; he didn't even sell his PC for twice what he paid for it. He cleaned up-literally.

For two summers in 1965 and '66, Harris, economics, washed dishes and did laundry at Fort Belvoir in Alexandria, Va.

The civilian equivalent of KP consisted of washing enough pots, pans and dishes to feed 50 to 100 people, preparing meals and peeling potatoes.

Laundry duty was dumping 12-foot baskets full of dirty socks and underwear into huge washing machines and then into dryers and mixing batches of syrupy starch.

Harris did all of this in rooms without air conditioning in the dead heat of Virginia summers.

His first summer at Fort Belvoir-at age 16-was at an Officers' Candidate School dining room mess hall.

The heat was so intense in the kitchens, he recalled, that the Army would shut them down when summer temperatures got too high. Though the work was hard and the heat intense, there was one compensation, he said. "The food was pretty good."

Some of the cooks he worked for became his friends. One soldier had recently returned from Vietnam.

"I told the cook that he was lucky to have had a 'safe' job behind the lines. He said, 'Do you know what it's like when someone yells 'ATTACK!' and you've only got a spoon in your hand?"

The next summer, Harris was assigned to the laundry room. It will be a less gritty job than in the kitchen, he thought.

It was worse.

He described being in an incredibly hot room with "tons" of dirty socks, underwear and other personal items.

"GI laundry comes in all kinds of conditions. I'm just glad I didn't have to sort them," Harris said.

He would hoist baskets full of dirty clothing into several industrial-size washing machines.

"Everyone was asked if they wanted their clothes lightly starched, medium starched, heavily starched or no starch. I'd mix these vats of thick syrupy starch in five-gallon pots and throw the boiling starch right into the machines. Clothes went back to their wearers either heavily starched or no starch at all," Harris said.

Those two summers were a wake-up call, Harris said.

"Really, it was an incentive to do well in school so you wouldn't have to do either job for the next 40 years," Harris said.

They were "highly motivating experiences."