Working at The Car-wash

By kiki

Watching the 1976 movie "Car Wash" inspired me to write this short story about my days working at Miller's Car-Wash in the early 1950s

In early 1952, I asked my older sister Rachel, who worked at Miller's Car Wash in Whittier, CA. If there was a chance that I could get a summer job there because I wanted to save money to buy my first car, I wanted to meet all the nice lookin' girls working there. The girls were from the local barrios: Pico, Canta-Ranas, Jimtown, Rivera, and Simons - She told me that I had to be 16 years old and needed a work permit from school to get a job there. I informed her that I would be turning 16 in December of that year and that maybe she could say to the owner, Mr. Miller, that I was already 16, "you mean lie for you?" she asked me, "let's call it shading the truth a bit" I replied to her. "I'll see what I can do for you," she responded.

A few days later, she told me that Mr. Miller wanted to see me that coming Saturday morning - I woke up bright and early that Saturday morning, and after grabbing something to eat, Rachel and I left our house in Pico for the car wash. I am trying to remember how we got to the car wash since neither Rachel nor I had a car. But it could be that one of her friends drove us there. When we arrived, Rachel showed me to Mr. Miller's office; I knocked on the door and heard a gruff voice say, "Come in," so I did. Mr. Miller, sitting behind a desk, asked me to sit down so we could talk. The first thing Mr. Miller told me was that he knew I wasn't 16 yet but that if I really wanted to work and could trust me to work hard and not just look at the girls, he would look the other way. He asked me if I could be trusted to keep my mind on the job and not on the girls. I answered him with what I thought he really wanted to hear, "I'm not sure you can trust me to do that" After laughing his ass off, he hired me at 75 cents an hour during the week and $1.00 an hour on weekends. Summer weekends were the busiest days.

My first assignment was on the vacuum cleaners, which was okay, but it was too far away from the girls. Girls were hired to clean the inside of the windows/dashboards. I later saw that Mr. Miller had an eye on Rachel, my second cousins Carmen and Guera, and a couple of friends from Simons, Gloria, and Susie - As time passed, I was reassigned to one of the steam cleaners' trenches. The trenches were about two feet deep, two feet wide, and about five feet long. With one on each side of the cars, we would steam clean the chrome bumpers and the white wall tires from those trenches. 

I worked closer to the girls but was too damn busy to hit on the girls who were not relatives or spoken for. I didn't get a car wash, girl, but I did buy my first car (a 1938 Chevy) before turning 16......I worked at the car wash for the next three years....  by the time I left in 1955, I was married and earning $1.25 an hour...I had a great time working at the car wash!