“Boys, this is the last time I’m telling for you to get up and get dressed. Bring your sheets and I need help with the washing. If you’re not here in five minutes I’m coming in there with a switch,” Mom yelled from the kitchen. It was Saturday, it was sunny, and it was late. No watches or clocks in our room, but the sun had been up for a while. We slowly rolled out of bed, put our clothes on, stripped the bed and drug the sheets and pillow-cases to the kitchen. I pushed my brother Alan onto the pile of dirty laundry and threw our sheets on top of him. He squealed. Mom and I both laughed.
Saturdays were laundry and grocery shopping days in post-WWII Lyman.
If the weather was good it seemed the whole town’s wet laundry was hung out on
clotheslines by mid-morning to dry in the fresh air. On rainy Saturdays, the
process was very different and women hung their wet laundry inside on drying
racks, usually near a stove. I think it was the busiest work day of the week
for most moms. At our house everyone was expected to pitch in, and Mom was busy
from daylight ‘til dark. As kids we got little reprieves, and this is kind of
how it went.
Mom already had our wooden kitchen table pushed against the wall
and had rolled the washing machine in from the back porch. A small hose was
attached to the faucet, filling the washer tub with hot water. She added Tide,
or maybe it was Oxydol, laundry soap powder to the hot water in the Speed Queen
wringer/washing machine as the water rose to her desired level. She’d
tell us to bring in the tub, and we’d get the big tub from the back porch and
set it up on two wooden apple crates beside the washing machine and use the
hose to fill the tub halfway with cold water for rinsing the soap out of the
freshly washed laundry items.
The tub was a round galvanized steel tub and was used for a
variety of things besides rinsing the wash. It was also our bathtub and it was used
for canning, for dying fabrics, covering chickens with their heads cut off in
the backyard to keep them from running around, covering undead catfish to keep
them from flopping all around the backyard, and it was used for ”bobbing for
apples” at Halloween, among other things. The tub was heavy and took both of us
to carry it into the kitchen and set it up. In our teens, either of us could
handle it alone.
After setting the tub up we helped ourselves to a bowl of Wheaties
or Corn Flakes and ate breakfast at our ugly chartreuse kitchen table while Mom
washed the laundry only a couple of feet away.
Mom, following directions from the soap box, always washed the
white things in hot water first, then as the water cooled, the colored stuff
got washed. After each load, she’d swing the wringer arm over the wash water
and run each washed item through the wringer then put it in the rinse water.
When we finished our cereal one of us, me, would take the wash plunger and
repeatedly dunk the washed items in the cold rinse water to remove the soap.
After several dunks Alan ran each item through the wringer to squeeze out as
much water as possible and dropped the washed and rinsed items into a basket
sitting on a wooden chair. Mom usually made us switch places because wet things
were heavy and I was bigger and stronger. He was smaller and weaker.
After a few basket-loads we siphoned the soapy rinse water out through
a hole in the floor onto the ground under the house, emptying the rinse tub.
Then we filled it halfway again with cold water for the rest of the rinsing.
Kay, our older sister, took each basket of cold wet laundry out to
the backyard and hung it all on clotheslines, using clothespins to keep
everything in place. The four wire clotheslines stretched between two T-posts
about twenty feet apart, with six-foot cedar beanpoles propping up each line
about midway to keep them from sagging too much. Sometimes, just for fun, Alan
and I would sneak out there and knock the beanpoles down and run away giggling
while we got yelled at by Kay and Mom. Most laundry was dry in two to four
hours, depending on the weather.
After the work in the kitchen was done, the washing machine tub
and the rinse tub were both siphoned down through the hole in the floor and we carried
the rinse tub and rolled the washing machine to the back porch. While our
laundry was drying on the clotheslines, Mom walked to the store to do her
weekly grocery shopping and pick up mail at the post office. When we were younger
one or both of us boys went with her and helped bring the groceries home in our
wagon. After the groceries were home we usually hightailed it out of there and
showed back up around suppertime, unless we were invited to eat at a buddy’s
house, which was fairly common. The buddy’s Mom let our Mom know that we were
eating at their place.
After the groceries were put away and the laundry was dry Kay and
Mom took each item off the clotheslines, folded it and placed each item in a
basket, then brought each basket inside and put everything away, then went back
out and did it again until all the laundry had been folded, brought inside and
put away. Then they remade all the beds.
After supper it was time for Saturday night baths. We brought the big
tub back into the kitchen, set it on the floor in front of the sink and Mom
filled it with hot water. Wearing her bathrobe, her towel and wash cloth in
hand, she closed all the curtains and doors in and out of the kitchen and took
her bath first. Sister was next, then me, and little brother was last. The
water was fairly cool and sometimes even cold by the time it was our turn. After
we all were bathed for the week, and in our pajamas, we again siphoned the tub
water down through the floor and took it to the back porch.
That was our Saturday. The next morning, we put on clean clothes
and probably got them dirty on our half-mile walk to church.