In memory of Grandpa Lach 1918-2007

In the summer of 1986 I took my first paying job as a dishwasher at my grandfather’s custard stand in Milwaukee, WI. I was thirteen years old and I made minimum wage, which at the time was $3.35 an hour. My first day on the job, my grandpa took me back into his office to give me a scoop of custard and to hand down the following law, “When you are on the clock, you are not my granddaughter, you are my employee. I expect you to behave as one.”

Regardless of my employee-only status during dishwashing hours, I had a great time working there. There was a 3 by 1 foot hole by the dishwasher’s station that was used to bring in the trays of dirty dishes. Mostly it was a peephole to look out into the restaurant and gossip about some of the crazy customers with my 60 year old co-worker. I don’t remember all the crazy customers but I do remember the guy who would come in and put salt on his chocolate sundae. The job had other perks for a 13 year old….like going down in the basement cooler to get a big can of Hershey’s chocolate syrup and licking the spoon after I was done pouring it into the serving jar…like making the soup in a pot I could have sit in (I’d like to mention now that there wasn’t much besides the custard that was homemade)…like carving the cheese slices on the big carving machine…like custom ordering your burgers and hot dogs from the cook at lunchtime.

It was a great first job and true to his word, my grandpa always treated me like an employee, but an employee that he really liked a lot.

My grandpa passed away this past Wednesday. I am very fortunate in the fact that he is the very first of any of my immediate family to die, however, that fact alone made me take the news as a bit of a shock. I was honestly beginning to think that my family would live forever. I am not as close to my grandfather as I wished I would have been. But I do have my memories and if you will excuse the slight switch in posts, I’d like to list a couple more of them here, sans pictures.

When I was much younger than 13, when we would go to visit my grandpa at the custard stand, he would let any of the grandkids keep any money they found on the floor of the office. He would count the money of the day back there and change was due to fall. My grandfather was big man. Well over 6 feet tall and almost as wide, picking up a fallen dime off the floor to even out the books would be way too much effort for a big man in a small office to muster. The floor of the office was covered in a layer of grease and dust tracked in from the kitchen (the kitchen was always cleaned, the office…never) but that didn’t stop the grandkids from getting grease and dirt under their fingernails for the $2.47 the floor was bound to contain. I think I once garnered over ten bucks but that was due to a lull in other grandkids visiting. With a pocket full of dirty money, I could saunter into the kitchen and make myself a huge custard sundae with chocolate, caramel, chocolate sprinkles (aka: Jimmies), and not one but four cherries. Yeah, I was a big kid.

Speaking of big, the other great memory I have is at my brother’s 5th or 6th birthday party. Grandpa had showed up as a passenger in our Uncle Dennis’s new corvette. Grandpa, as I mentioned, was a big man and the Corvette was a very small car. Not understanding how he managed to get into the car in the first place, he had a hell of time trying to get out. I’m sadden by the fact that we didn’t have a camcorder at the time as seeing my grandfather stuck in a little gold Corvette like Pooh Bear - with my father pulling on his arms on one side and my Uncle Dennis using his feet to push grandpa from the other - was a classic.

I’ll miss you Grandpa Lach.