Washing dishes was dirty work. Even as John Fogerty sang of having “cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis” from the diner’s jukebox, there was nothing grand about loading and unloading the Hobart for eight hours. But the time laboring at that small diner in Forest Park, Georgia, a suburb just south of Atlanta, provided a few lessons in life that a church-going 16-year-old boy may not have absorbed otherwise. And besides, the food, most of it pretty good, was free. A waitress would serve it up as she would for any customer. She knew that before the first dish could be washed, the bus boy got his breakfast. What was it Tom Waits said? “Hash browns, hash browns, you know I can’t be late.”
Great article, Jeff. I think Diana Goodman was in my class of high school. I definitely remember her, but had no idea she became Miss Georgia.