IN AND OUT OF THE GALLEY

Whenever I try to calculate exactly what I owe Charlie Pfeiffer, I am boggled and ticked at the same time. For certain, though, when I backtrack the trail my life has taken, the very first step on that trail was when I went off to work for “the Babe”.

In 1956 I was a 16-year-old sophomore at Woodbury High School in the rural south of New Jersey, the area that gave rise to the nickname “Garden State”. At the time, a lot of farmland was being converted to housing developments for industrial workers commuting to the Delaware Valley, but Birdseye, Seabrook Farms, and Campbell’s Soups still operated huge truck farms. It was blue-collar and middle-class all the way.

My particular dilemma was finding my place in the high school caste system. At the top were the star athletes; just below them, the cats who had the coolest cars, clothes, hair styles, dance moves, or some combination of the above. At the very bottom were the nerds and bookworms, those hopeless enough to actually study and do well in their classes. I was skinny and gawky, had no hot car, even with a gallon of Vitalis my hair couldn’t hold a d.a., and worst of all I’d been a good student back before I knew any better. To be one of the guys I needed to work twice as hard to get poor grades.

Of course, this drove my parents crazy. Although my father never went to college, it was one of his life goals that I should go. He couldn’t understand why I was suddenly getting D’s and he thought the solution would be to send me to a Quaker day school in nearby Philadelphia. Dismayed by his plan, I was determined to resist it. Prep schools were for spoiled, stuck-up snots. And so, the battle lines were drawn.

Then, one day, an older friend told me about this great job he’d had the previous summer, washing dishes at some camp on Cape Cod. You see, Charlie Pfeiffer and his wife Ollie lived in the neighboring town of Almonesson, and Charlie customarily recruited his galley crews from Woodbury H.S. The job was never advertised; it was passed along the grapevine, class to class, year to year, friend to friend. This ensured that there was a continuity between the crew of one year and that of the next. Prime candidates were in their early years of high school—not yet ready for steady girlfriends or serious summer jobs. Eager for any excuse to get away from home and out of town, I joined four of my Woodbury cronies and headed for what would be a whole new world: Camp Viking.

Legend had it that Charlie Pfeiffer had been a galley cook and old pal of Ced’s from the navy. Hindsight casts doubt on that story, however, since they came from such obviously different backgrounds. Military service may be notorious for breaking down social barriers, but never once in my four summers at Viking did I see Ced and Charlie spend any “down time” together, as you might expect from old navy buds.

In any case, they had an excellent working relationship based on mutual respect and trust. Ced trusted Charlie to run the dining hall totally unsupervised, and Charlie trusted Ced to give him that absolute authority. They were also similar in their skillful use of a made-up persona as a strategy for dealing with the Camp Viking community. While Ced’s swashbuckling-skipper act led the way, Charlie’s despot-of-the-mess-hall routine was equally important in making the camp the rich, magic, yet smooth-functioning place it was.

Can’t you see him now, as he strides through the swinging door to address the campers? Wiping his hands on his apron and adjusting the toothpick in his mouth, he slowly raises his hand. Then his grizzled old face, wrinkled like one of his beloved prunes, starts going in a million directions at once. His eyebrows bounce up and down, his lips purse and grimace, his eyelids flutter. And then: “Aaaaahh, lemme haaaaave yer ‘tention.” What a show! And just enough over the top that even the youngest, most easily terrified campers had to grin.

Charlie used pretty much the same strategy in managing his galley crew. It was a pretty demanding job for us, with each day beginning at six a.m. Woe to the lad who showed up late, or who tried to perform one of our many tasks—washing dishes, peeling potatoes, swabbing the deck, mixing up bug juice—in anything but the Charlie-approved manner. “Aaaaah, babe, whadda ya think yer doin’?”, delivered loud enough for the whole camp to hear, guaranteed that we’d never make that mistake again.

Charlie seemed to be hard of hearing. Like many with a hearing impairment, he had a louder-than-normal voice even in normal conversation. “Aaaaah, speak up, babe,” was his usual response to a question timidly put. Naturally, we couldn’t resist testing him in his regard, and one of our early amusements was to mutter obscenities and insults behind his back, just loud enough for ourselves. Charlie showed absolutely no reaction, but later events made us suspect that this might just be part of his act.

One of my fellow crew members that first year was a guy who had established a reputation in junior high as the class clown. I’d lost track of him in high school, but when I heard he was to be part of the Viking crew, I figured he’d be good for some laughs. It turned out otherwise, however. The poor doofus just wasn’t able to pick up on Charlie’s techniques. He peeled potatoes with fast little away strokes instead of the long deep swipes back towards the thumb that Charlie advocated. Nor could he seem to master the wrist action required to flip the mop over when swabbing the main hall deck. Charlie was on his case constantly, and it’s no surprise that he was the most frequent author of those comments that we assumed went unheard. A couple of weeks into the season, he was told to pack his things and he was sent home.

That was all that was needed to raise our performance to the desired level, and the remaining four of us settled into the galley routine with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine. It was years later that it hit me: Charlie would never have hired a fifth person for a job that four could handle fairly well. It had to be a ploy. My second year, five were again hired. This time, one of the crew decided that he preferred the company of his girlfriend over that of Charlie Pfeiffer, and after a week or two he left voluntarily. Once more, four of us handled the job quite well for the remainder of the summer.

We had to work hard and with a certain degree of coordination. It was three meals a day for 120 hungry bodies. Though we did none of the actual cooking, all of the set-up, prep, and cleanup was our responsibility. This was before the days when machines for dishwashing, potato-peeling, or potato-mashing made their appearance in the Viking galley. We washed dishes by hand in scalding hot water, per Charlie’s instructions, and the rinse water needed to be even hotter. Only by wearing rubber gloves, in which we would run cold tapwater, were we able to reach in to retrieve the clean items.

Scraping was another miserable job. That little window where the dirty dishes were brought from each table was a classing bottleneck. There wasn’t enough counter space by the window to accommodate all the dishes from a meal, so manning this position meant that you became a human tornado-with-rubber-spatula from the arrival of the first plate to the moment when the last one slipped into the sudsy dishwater. Food scraps flew everywhere. By the end of the summer our clothes and hair reeked of eau de slopbucket.

The mess hall and galley were kept smelling springtime-fresh, however. After every meal the hall was swept from stem to stern and all the tables were wiped down. Twice a week, after taking the tables outside, we mopped the floor with Charlie’s special formula of bleach and Pine-Sol, then with fresh water. The tables were swabbed with the same concoction, and food particles were routed out of cracks with a butter knife.

Another twice-weekly expectation was genuine mashed potatoes for supper. As a result, after completing the cleanup following the midday meal, we each had to peel about forty potatoes for the pot. Every year, Charlie would painstakingly instruct his crew in the proper method (I use it to this day). Invariably, one of the crew would boast that he could do it faster his own way, and the contest would begin—on one side, furious activity and peelings going in all directions, and on the other side, Charlie’s careful, steady stroke. After ten minutes, guess whose pile was higher?

Before long, we got good enough at our chores to have an hour and a half free in the morning and nearly three hours most afternoons. Here’s what made the summer truly great, for we were permitted to take part in all the camp activities. We worked up through various N.R.A. badges on the rifle range. We earned our Red Cross Life Saving cards with the swimming department. We experimented with archery. We played baseball and hoops with the older campers and younger counselors. We borrowed canoes, and every now and then we were offered a ride in one of the camp sailboats.

As soon as we finished out evening routine, we were free until six a.m. the next morning. Wednesdays and Sundays, the counselors covered the evening meal and we were able to leave even earlier. We had no vehicle, but in those days hitchhiking wasn’t such a risky venture. We managed to travel all over the outer Cape—hoping to pick up girls in Hyannis, hoping to get served at a bar in Chatham, checking out the bohos in P-town, or just getting some ice cream at the HoJo’s in Orleans. We were fairly lucky thumbing rides, but many’s the morning we staggered into camp, having walked for miles in the dawn’s early light, just in time to report for our breakfast chores. This brand-new environment, together with the brand-new freedom to explore its countless possibilities, real and imagined, was just what I needed.

The cape was a totally different world from South Jersey—different even from the scene at the Jersey shore. Like all teenagers, I was keenly attuned to style, and on the Cape the style was definitely Ivy League rather than greaser. Guys actually wore Bermuda shorts and did not automatically get beaten up. As a matter of fact, they seemed to score quite well with the chicks. The whole place had an aura of class that I found impressive.

In the Camp Viking hierarchy, counselors were many lofty layers above the galley crew. To us Jersey hicks most of them seemed pretty cool. But darned if they weren’t all attending those prestigious colleges I’d been so scornful of. The older campers and junior counselors, guys our age with whom we’d started hanging out, were going to prep schools and had their sights set on those same colleges. By summer’s end I had somewhat revised by former attitude toward the value of an education. I also wanted to return to the Cape.

My second summer at Viking was better than the first. Now I was an old hand, and Charlie relied on me to show the new crew members the ropes. He and I became more familiar, and I being to glimpse that there was more to him than the face he usually put on for the camp population. No longer cowed, I could observe him in a new light. I grew to realize that he was a wiser and kinder man than I had previously given him credit for. Halfway through that second summer, I got up the gumption to address him as “Babe,” his term for everyone else. He half smiled and let it pass, and pretty soon that’s what most of the camp was calling him.

I also got chummier with some of the returning counselors. They weren’t such an exotic breed to me anymore now that—yup!—I’d been attending that Quaker day school for the past year and was myself college-bound. In fact, at the end of that season, I headed off to visit several New England campuses (my parents’ dream come true). Leaving camp was a bittersweet moment, however, as I assumed it was my final farewell.

But Viking had a stronger hold on me than I knew. After my first year at Williams, I called Ced and talked him into hiring me as a shop counselor. Coming back was a real pleasure. The Babe treated me like one of his boys who had made it to the big time. He loved to have me tell his new crew, who now had a dishwashing machine and a mechanized potato-peeler, about the olden days all of two and three years earlier, when we had to do those jobs by hand. He seemed entirely comfortable with my knowing that his act was just that. Once, I swear, after one of his performances he winked at me.

Those two summers in the shop were a rich time for me. Working with the campers was so challenging and satisfying that I began to consider a teaching career. I think, though, that the greatest treasure I gleaned from the Viking experience is the conviction that it’s playing and having fun that brings out the very best in people. Thanks, Babe.

-- Mac Benford