The Age of Uniforms
from the Winter 2002 print MISC
by Matt Briggs
MOM FIRST WORKED for Boeing in the late ’60s, in a long building with dirty windows overlooking the Duwamish River. She worked as a production illustrator, producing diagrams and signs. She didn’t keep the job for long, but she said this was her favorite job.
She wore blue jeans and black boots and an oxford shirt, or sometimes she wore a dark blue skirt and a sweater. Graphite always filled the space under her fingernails.
Always a boom and bust town, Seattle busted in the beginning of the ’70s. Boeing’s layoffs resulted in a company town without much of a company left. Mom found work waiting tables and wearing other people’s clothes. Washington State law stated at the time that if your employer required you to wear clothing of a particular color or style, he or she had to provide it.
SCOTTY WATTS OWNED the Copper Kitchen Restaurant, where Mom first met my father while she waited on tables. Scotty also owned the Peppermill and the Dutch Oven. Scotty Watts’s waitresses wore mustard colored dresses and mustard colored hats that looked like mushrooms. Because the top-heavy hats fell into people’s soup, none of the waitresses wore them.
“We girls rolled up our dresses because they came down over our knees,” Mom said. “The waist had an elastic strip and we folded the dresses and tucked them in and tied the apron string to keep everything up. The style then was to wear your skirt cut just below your crotch.”
After she married my father, Scotty moved Mom to the Peppermill. She wore the same uniform. Mom said the shoes were the most important article of clothing with a waitress uniform. She bought nurse shoes that only came in white and she shoe polished them brown to match her uniform. The heavy rubber soles looked like gigantic translucent erasers.
In the spring of that year, when Mom became pregnant, my father insisted that they get married. He had already been in enough trouble that they’d suspended his driver’s license; but he still drove his dented blue Buick. He’d sworn off alcohol. In the months she’d known him, my father seemed sober and even a little nerdy and not at all like a drunk. Mom said, “You don’t know about someone’s history until it becomes your own past.” That summer, she miscarried and spent three days in the University of Washington Medical Center.
In the beginning of September, Mom began work at the Alpine Cafeteria. The waitresses left the brown dresses with muttonchop sleeves at the restaurant. They wore white aprons and wedgies. They were supposed to wear hair nets. The hair nets would slip off into people’s food, so they took them off and kept their hair in ponytails, which fit the theme of the restaurant anyway.
Labor Day fell on her second or third day and, because she was new, she didn’t know to worry when the other waitresses didn’t come in. Few restaurants were open, so crowds of people sat in the restaurant. The food kept on coming. Mom didn’t know where the plates were supposed to go, so order after order piled up on the hot counter. Angry customers pointed out their food.
The busboy was a 35-year-old mute. He’d lost his voice from screaming in Alaska. He’d been in two airplane crashes working the salmon. The older waitresses treated him like shit. He wore blue jeans and a T-shirt. Mom and he formed a little team because she would give him tips and treat him well and so he’d bus her tables quickly; so she had a better turn-around on her tables and was able to make more money per table than the older waitress.
Many of the waitresses at the Alpine Cafeteria had worked there for years. Each had her own regular customers. They were stunted, hard women with gray legs and dyed black hair and faces like stale doughnuts. They took their time and nothing stopped them or sped them up. “It was a horrible job. I only lasted for four months there.”
Two weeks after she started at the Alpine Cafeteria, Scotty came and said my father was in the King County Jail. He’d been pulled over and put in jail because of his suspended license.
Finally, she went back to the Peppermill. The cooks wore black and white checkered slacks and double-breasted blouses. Scotty didn’t allow the waitresses to take their uniforms home. She worked there until she was pregnant with me.
After a couple of months off, she went to work at the Denny’s on Aurora Avenue North and worked there until she was pregnant with my brother. She had to buy an orange and brown uniform and had to wear it to work and home because there wasn’t any place to change. They wanted to upgrade the image of waitresses, to make them more like stewardesses. They wore very heavy A-line dresses (costing $12 to $15) and black turtlenecks. She didn’t like to wear the dress home on the bus, because the brown fabric smelled like the kitchen and the food and cigarette smoke.
She worked there until she was five months pregnant. She made her own dress using matching fabric because their dresses wouldn’t accommodate a pregnant figure. Finally the manager fired Mom for her pregnancy. “You can’t even wear the uniform,” he said. “My customers are complaining that you are working too hard for a pregnant woman.”
She didn’t work for nine months or so. In that time, she had my brother and the family moved to Fall City in the Snoqualmie Valley.
At the Gateway Cafe in North Bend, a roadhouse on Sunset Highway and then the original interstate, Mom wore a black skirt and white shirt. They supplied the apron. She kept a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate of the special in the other.
The lumberjacks wore corkboots and blue jeans cut just above the boots. Red suspenders held up their loose pants. They came in directly from the logging camp where they weren’t allowed to drink. They came in covered in mud and sawdust.
“Just like an old time saloon, at first they would accidentally brush up against your breasts or you’d feel a cold hand on the back of your thigh; and as the night wore on, they moved into the Moriritz Room where they’d all try to grab you and you’d have to dance and squirm past them.”
Only women bartenders worked at the Gateway. They called the owner, Edna, “The One Armed Bandit.” She lost the arm in a washing machine as a little girl. It was one of those old-fashioned ones with belts. She was a very good-looking woman. She ran the place like a drill sergeant. She encouraged the girls to make the men happy. Her husband was named Bear and he kept to the back room doing accounting. In the summer, the girls wore halter tops and brief shorts. At the end of the night, they served the lumberjacks breakfast and coffee.
At the Summit House at Snoqualmie Pass, an ancient structure of raw logs with plywood and drywall and insulation tacked to the interior, Mom wore black skirts and a white blouse and red paisley vests with pockets. The homeless bartender slept in the storeroom. He let a cigarette go and it burned the place down. With no running water at the Pass, there wasn’t enough water to put out the fire.
The next place, Ken’s Truck Town, required her to wear a white polyester nurse-style uniform. They supplied these; but the waitresses had to change into them in the break room. Mom caught pneumonia from the walk-in freezer and was sick for a long time. The customers started to complain. Her boss told her, “Tomorrow you come back well.” She went to the doctor, took penicillin, and started to look for another job.
“I had interviewed with Scott Adams before. I went down looking for a job. I remembered the interview from before being really long and like he was grilling a potential chief financial officer of a bank. I told him I could wait a rush with 250 customers on the floor, and I was looking for a job. He told me I must be a real crackerjack waitress. He hired me right on the spot.”
He owned the Denny’s on 4th Avenue South, in the franchise’s original diamond-shaped building. Mom had to buy another single piece orange and brown uniform with black stockings and dark shoes, the same uniform she hadn’t been able to wear four years before.
He eventually fired her for being too volatile. Mom says it was because she was getting a ride to work sometimes from Harold Johnson, a black guy. Everyone thought she was sleeping with him. Specifically, Scott Adams fired her because she refused to take a personal check. Mom obeyed the policy that Denny’s would not accept personal checks. A guy came in and Mom didn’t accept his check even though he was a regular. She was fired a couple of days later.
When she went back to pick up her last paycheck from Scott Adams, he hunched down to ask me how I was holding up. I asked him, “Why did you fire my mom?” He wore a blue suit and kept his two individual clumps of hair on either side of his head neatly stacked and the clean bald expanse of skin between them oiled like a highly polished linoleum floor. He had an expansive black mustache and slightly damp, red lips. He held my arms and started to cry. “Tiger, your Mom will always have a job here.”
“It became clear to me I would be one of those old nasty Seattle waitresses. Clear to me I wouldn’t be able to stay married to your father. The job I had that made me the happiest was when I had been a production assistant at Boeing.”
MOM WORE POLYESTER slacks and shirts when she went to Bellevue Community College to study drafting. After her second year at BCC, she found a job at the Ambrose Co. at an Overlake office park. She wore slacks and shirts.
Ambrose created a line of machines designed to fill paint containers. Mom did manual drafting on boards. Mom produced complicated blueprints for the company; her mechanical drafting block letters filled the margins. In the front office, the company paid for the women’s hair to be done. “They were dressed to the nines,” Mom said. “But I was in the back office and just kept my hair short.”
The summer she finished college she bought two suits, a wool herringbone jacket and skirt and a gabardine jacket and skirt. Before she left my father and moved to Renton, she walked hurriedly through the house wearing thin high heels and her work uniform. On the soft wood floors she left a trail of heel impressions like someone pressing the tip of a pencil into a sheet of clay.
SHE FOUND A JOB right away at Boeing where she became a tech-aid, a drafter, on the 737-200. When she came home late after driving along the stop and go traffic on 405 and then the long drive from Eastlake to North Bend on I-90, she still wore her Boeing Security badge over one pocket. When someone got a job at Boeing, they always said, “I got on at Boeing’s.”
Every fourth person in the area had a job making airplanes. The other seventy-five percent of the population called Boeing “the Lazy B;” when they asked someone to explain their job there, they couldn’t make sense of the explanation.
For seven years, Mom wore professional clothes. In 1987, casual Fridays started. “On Friday you wore whatever you wanted to wear,” Mom said. “The guys wore polo shirts and jeans. After a while it was like that every day. Now, I don’t wear uniforms anymore.”
