Working Title: How I won a FREE TOILET and got TRICKED into cleaning Bathrooms.

Don, you brought a lot of good clean fun to the world and will be greatly missed. I met Don once and only once as a 4-H kid with my club the Needles n’Spoons. But he made a big impact. I went on to follow in Don’s footsteps and give my own cleaning demonstration at age 9 or 10(?) At the Western Idaho Fair at least partly inspired by him.

I was also partially inspired by the Cheaper by the Dozen (CBTD) book my dad read aloud to us. The CBTD family timed everything including baths to make sure no one wasted any time (why did none of this make it into the movie?!). And of course, I’m sure my mom deserves some credit for convincing/tricking(?) me into thinking it was my idea. Was it really? I still don’t actually know. The truth may never come out until my life flashes before my eyes at some distant point in the future when my time, like Don’s, has come.

Of course my kid brain would combine the two stories and come up with cleaning as fast as you possibly can and then. Then… THEN! Telling everyone else how they can do it too and be as as you. Just in case you were wondering this did NOT score me any points on the popularity scale. My talk was entitled, “How to clean a bathroom in 3 minutes.” I wore a mic and everything and practiced with a timer all summer until I could NAIL scrubbing a toilet, tub and sink in 3 minutes flat. 3 MINUTES. (To this day I am still not sure how my mom convinced me this was a good idea. I must have had a kid’s sense of clean to call it good after 3 minutes. Or maybe if you do it for 3 minutes every day that’s all it takes to stay on top of it? (Fly Lady, another, ahem, popular book about cleaning tends to agree.) All I can say is it takes me way longer than 3 minutes to clean my bathrooms now. But. I also don’t do it every day.

As a kid I also cleaned out closets to deal with stress and make my parents proud. (I still clean closets over bathrooms when I am stressed). After all these childhood capers, you probably won’t be surprised (At ALL) to find out that I took my kids (who were SO happy to go with me) to the Museum of Clean in Pocatello at the beginning of August (True story). Yes, we got tickets from a student auction when no one else wanted to buy them but we wanted to support the ISU PA student’s fundraiser. With all this indoctrination on cleaning from a very young age, you would think my house is spotless, and that I love cleaning but it is Not, and I don’t love cleaning. (Not even close. Although with a good audio book it can be therapeutic). Especially when company is coming and you need it that extra level of nice. My husband and kids will testify in any court of law that our house is not regularly sparkling (except that would require using words and my teenagers only like to grunt. By which such caveman-like behavior any judge could likely infer that we do indeed live in caves and forage for our food and are very familiar with dirt. All those things are also true.

So, why this tribute to Don Aslett? He feels like a pretty big influence in my life even though I only met him once. I was born in Pocatello, Idaho while my dad was an ISU Bengal. Don got his start there too, if I remember right, and my mom and grandma and aunt all had at least one of his books (if not more). Yes. I read them, or at least parts of them. I don’t think you could have a connection to Pocatello and not know who Don was. A man who liked to clean was a novelty then. He is less so now and my Grandpa liked to vacuum daily after his retirement, so all things are possible. But maybe that was also due to Don’s influence since my Grandpa lived in Pocatello for most of his working years. So did my other Grandoa but he didn’t like to vacuum that I know of, so maybe Don’s influence only went so far. My house growing up was full of Don Aslett’s cleaning products in concentrate form and we had Systems we were taught to follow. One of the biggest things I remember is how important it is to have a good rug to catch the dirt at every outside entrance. It’s true. I’m still searching for the perfect one

Back to that cleaning seminar where I was inspired first-hand to become a professional bathroom cleaner . I remember going with my 4-H group to this cleaning seminar (that all our moms were super excited about) by Don Aslett. I’m not sure what was more of a novelty- that he made cleaning sound exciting and fun, or that he was a man who liked cleaning when none of my brothers would clean the bathroom with a ten foot pole. My FAVORITE part was that everyone in our group got something for free. Sadly, by the time they got to me, there was nothing left of whatever it was they were giving away. So I didn’t get one. But Don didn’t want me to go home empty handed so he gave me a toy toilet that sprayed water in your face when you lifted the lid. I felt like I had won the lottery. A free toilet all my own. It was my favorite. My brothers were so jealous. I even used it at the end of my cleaning demonstration at the fair to squirt my audience. Just like Don taught me. The gates of heaven are about to get a good scrubbing from one of the world’s most passionate cleaners I ever met. We’ll miss you in Idaho Don!