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Another mixed set of negatives.  All are from July 1973 ~

In 1973 I went to Denmark as a summer student with YFU – Youth for Understanding.  This contact sheet has images from a variety of rolls of film.  Some were shot in Kronborg Castle.  Some were shot around Vendsyssel.  Some come from Hjorring.  About half were shot around Oslo and its fjord. 

I had wanted to travel to Europe for as long as I could remember.  My parents told me that they were going to fly me to Germany the summer of 1970 so I could spend time with my aunt and uncle who was deployed there with the Army.  Instead, Dad bought a new Thunderbird.  I recognized that if I was going, I’d have to get there myself.

I wanted to visit a place unlike Muscatine.  The place most unlike Muscatine on the list of available placements was Yugoslavia.  When I told my friend, Craig Koll, that I was interested in spending my summer in Yugoslavia he said that I was nuts.  That if I wanted to visit socialism I’d have a much happier time in Scandinavia.  On reflection I knew that he was accurate and I signed up for Denmark.

To get there on my own I got a job, dishwashing and busboy at one of Muscatine’s finest dining establishments.  It was called The Cannery in honor of the Heinz catsup/ketchup factory upwind.  My first night there, the husband of a waitress escorted the bartender through the kitchen to the back porch where the husband persuaded the bartender to have no contact with his wife.  I asked my trainer if this happened often and he said, “Not often enough.”

The restaurant attracted the movers and shakers of Muscatine.  Roy Carver would show up with his girlfriend of the evening.  His wife occasionally came out on a weeknight to dine alone.  The head of the county crime commission took a shine to a cocktail waitress and gave her a pink Fiat 850 Spyder.  After their relationship soured he attempted unsuccessfully to get the car back in his name.  Then he torched it.  He pled down to reckless burning from arson 2.  It was quite common to see the titans of Muscatine drunk and silly at the restaurant.  A few times I served teachers from high school who were married, but not to each other. 

Within a few months, the other busboy/dishwashers quit.  I persuaded the manager, Virgil Abby, to hire my friend Peter Biere.  On Peter’s first night as a dishwasher, he asked what he should do with the wine carafes that still contained wine.  I told him to drink them, but don’t let the manager see you.  Peter got quickly sloshed on many small doses of wine, but stayed unfired.  Phil Steele later joined the crew.

The kitchen was run by a husband and wife team.  With enough time I will remember their names.  Ted and Earlene.  They were from Arkansas and rather rough-hewn.  Part of my duties was some of their kitchen prep.  Washing potatoes.  Mixing salad dressing.  Salad bar and bread-steamer set-up.  The one perc of the job was getting a non-steak dinner.  I usually went for the reuben sandwich, and still remember them fondly.  Towards the end of my time there, Ted got sick.  As the days went on he got grayer and grayer.  Earlene got tenser and tenser.  Eventually he couldn’t make it in to work.  It was a desperate situation for her.  She had to work to afford to live so she couldn’t spend her time with her dying husband.  If she couldn’t manage the kitchen by herself then the restaurant would have to find someone else and she’d have to find a different job.  I left before I saw the resolution of this drama.

I got paid minimum wage, somewhere around $1.25 an hour, plus 1/10^th of the tips that the waitresses got.  I was pulling in around $1.50 an hour.  It was an education watching the waitresses maximize their tips.  There were a variety of women, but they all needed to be making as much money as they could to survive.  Some were fun, like the woman who had the convertible Beetle.  Others were as hard-bitten as Barbara Stanwyck in a cinema noir movie. 

It took all of my junior year in high school working four evenings a week to earn the $900 it took to go to Denmark.  No one else beat the bartender during my tenure.  After I quit, I threw away the four or five ties I wore to work.  They had all gotten filthy with grease and grime.  Shaking the dust from my feet.