Clarksville visits Dick’s Hamburgers

The world is filled with mysteries that vex us.

The whereabouts of Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa come to mind.

And what planet sent the space aliens who built the pyramids?

Late-night radio talk shows have debated that one for years.

Spokane, too, has its top secrets.

At the head of the line, as far as I’m concerned, are those cheery mentalists who work at Dick’s Hamburgers – the landmark fast food eatery at Third Avenue and Division Street.

Anyone who has ever been to Dick’s knows that this place does an incredible amount of business.

Yet the counter workers never write anything down.

Say a busload containing an out-of-state college lacrosse team pulls into the parking lot. All 35 players and coaches will get out and start jabbering orders through the windows at once like it’s morning rush at the New York Stock Exchange.

The smiling workers will somehow assimilate it all without relying on pen and paper. Ten minutes later, the Whammy burgers and fish and chicken and fries will come out, all bagged and distributed correctly.

Money is forked over. Change is forked back.

Everybody’s happy.

Everybody except me, it seems.

How do they do it?

What’s the trick?

So I made a phone call to Lynda Peterson, the 66-year-old co-owner of Dick’s. I asked if she’d let me come in to work and learn what really goes on behind the curtain of thick glass.

Sure, she told me, adding that I’d probably want to stop by a few days early and pick up the book.

You bet, I told her, not having a clue about what she was talking about.

Ha! And I thought I loved Dick’s. Peterson started working there when she was 18 and is now an owner.

If that’s not the American Dream, I’m moving to Spangle.

Anyway, a day or two later found me knocking on the back door of Dick’s. Soon I was meeting my boss-to-be, Jackie Nelson, whose career at Dick’s dates back to the Nixon administration.

True, Nelson took a nine-year sabbatical to raise her kids. But she returned to Dick’s sometime in the 1990s and stayed put.

I immediately liked this raspy-voiced, gregarious woman. Nelson seems tough as nails, yet at the same time she’s blessed with a loud self-deprecating sense of humor.

“You can have fun here and be yourself,” she told me. “Everybody knows Dick’s.”

Amen to that. With it’s ’50s architecture, cute “BUY THE BAGFULL” sign and open-air ordering area, Dick’s is as much a Spokane icon as the Clocktower or the garbage-eating goat.

I love the ketchup-only Whammy so much that my lovely wife, Sherry, once took me there on my birthday and bought me a Dick’s T-shirt along with my grub.

Nelson fished around inside a file cabinet. She eventually pulled out a three-page document that could have passed for the battle plan of Gen. Pickett’s Charge.

“You’ll need to study this,” she said, handing over the paperwork while grinning ear to ear.

A closer inspection revealed the documents to be a complete listing of Dick’s menu items along with scribbled notes like …

“Never Call in Anything. Hold Onions. Five or more of same kind of burger. Call in.”

And …

“Pink Indian = Sprite plus cherry syrup.”

Just staring at this gibberish made me woozy.

I took the papers and left, promising to return full of memorized knowledge.

“I’m doomed,” I thought as I drove away.

Cut to chase. I showed up Tuesday afternoon. I worked behind the counter. I attempted to take some orders.

And I still have no clue how they do it.

Peterson told me it was about associating customer with order, like: “Guy wearing baseball hat equals two Whammys, large fries and small Diet Coke.”

Huh?

Nelson suggested that repetition was the key.

As in, customer gives you order. You repeat it back. Then you repeat it back again when you give the order to the customer.

Yeah. Then you probably wake up in the night screaming orders into the void.

I’ll be honest. Working at Dick’s was like getting on stage with David Copperfield and participating in one of his illusions.

Then back to your seat you go, still wondering how the SOB made the damned elephant disappear.

Maybe some things are simply beyond knowing.

Even so, being a pretend Dick’s worker was a riot. It’s like participating in controlled chaos and thank God Nelson was there to hold my hand.

Take my first customer, an older woman who walked slowly up to my window.

“And how can I help you?” I barked in the happy hopeful voice of a used car salesman.

“I’m looking for my husband who disappeared,” she said sadly.

I stammered, “You’re, um, what?”

She was serious and worried. Her husband has dementia. He wandered off. She held up a smartphone with his photograph on the screen.

I was about to cry or maybe get her some free fries when Nelson quickly stepped in to save me. She commiserated with the woman, took her cellphone number and did a stellar job of handling the unexpected.

Which happens a lot at Dick’s.

This is no mere hamburger joint. Dick’s is a magnet for humanity of all levels of social strata, from the mayor to the average to the homeless.

Speaking of celebrities, rockers Styx came to Dick’s. Same for actor Cuba Gooding Jr. and the late Tom Foley.

Sometimes the most unwanted end of the spectrum shows up.

Nelson told me a story about this pervert who actually put his manitalia on the counter for God and everyone else to see.

My, Lord. What did you do?

“I grabbed a spatula, slapped it on the counter and said, ‘How do want that cooked?’ ”

This woman is my hero.

For awhile, I hung back and watched the random ebb and flow.

It was like watching waves rolling onto a beach. One moment, four or five customers are at the counter. Then all of a sudden, two dozen more appear.

It’s pretty much been this way ever since 1966, when owner Abe Miller renamed his Panda hamburger biz after his late son.

Miller, who died a few years ago, was a Spokane burger pioneer. In the early 1950s, he opened the city’s first Panda at Wellesley Avenue and Division. He eventually scaled back, keeping the lucrative Dick’s location.

Co-owner Lynda Peterson speaks of her former boss with a loving reverence.

“I was very privileged to work with him,” she said. “He took me by the hand and showed me everything about the business.

“Food cost. Management. He taught me so much. He was just the neatest boss.”

Miller was a fresh food champion long before it became a fad.

To this day, the ground beef comes into Dick’s every day, fresh and unfrozen. The fries are made from fresh-cut potatoes. Even the tartar sauce is made from scratch.

“It’s a potpourri of Spokane out there,” Nelson added, pointing to the outside waiting area.

“That’s because we’ve got something everybody loves – a good cheap meal.”