My Little Town 20111012. This is the Way that we Washed the Clothes

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Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

Here is how we washed clothes back when I was little.  We had a wringer washer, and it was not automatic at all.  Actually, it could be a fairly dangerous piece of equipment, especially for older women with pendulous breasts.  I mean that as no insult at all, but they were sort of “grabby”.

However, for folks who liked to line dry their clothes, they were the best.  I shall try to include some pictures here, so here we go!

My parents hired Ma to take care of me when I was little, and to take care of the house.  They did it all on the record, and Ma was eligible for Social Security because both of them paid into it.  Both of my parents worked, and Ma essentially lived with us a lot of the time, or other times I would be with her up the street at her house.

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s Ma would wash the clothes in a wringer washer and then hang them to dry on a clothesline.  I have a video of a wringer washer in action in a little while, but the people operating it are far from expert.

Anyway, in those days you sorted the clothes as to color and fabric type.  Whites got hot water and bleach, and except for towels and washcloths and underwear also got starch later.  Colors got warm water.  Ma did not believe in washing in cold water at all!

I shall show you the video of the wringer washer first and then explain how she used it.  Note that this particular washer is fairly new because it appears that it has a plastic dasher.  The one that we had had a metal one.

To wash whites, for example, Ma would carry hot water from the sink in a bucket and fill the machine.  Next she would add washing soda (sodium carbonate) and borax, then start the machine until the powders dissolved.  Then she would add the detergent, Oxydol, to the washer and when it had dissolved would add the clothes.  Those washers did not have a time cycle, so she ran it as long as she thought it needed.  A few minutes into the cycle she would add bleach, Purex, diluted with about five times its volume with water.  Then the machine was drained.  Dad had affixed a hose to it that led to the yard so that it could sit on the screened in porch.  Here is a picture of Oxydol, a Procter and Gamble product at the time.  The packaging that I remember is the eighth picture in this montage:

Oxydol

I could not find a decent picture of a period Purex bottle, and if anyone can please add it in the comments.  They had just transitioned to plastic bottles with metal caps.  I do not remember her using the glass ones.

After the wash was done, she drained the machine and then used a garden hose to fill it for rinse.  Most of the time she would also add some hot water for the rinse.  After the first rinse, if the whites were towels and washcloths and underwear they went through the wringer and and in a basket for the clothesline.  If they were bed linens and white outerwear, they got a second rinse with starch.

Ma would use Faultless starch with bluing.  The bluing (actually a complex iron and cyanide material) was in the starch to act as an optical brightener to offset the yellowish cast that white clothes acquire after repeated washings.  She would measure out however much she needed and then put in a pan with cold water, then bring it to the boil to disperse the starch.  In the meantime she was refilling the washer.  Once the starch came to the boil she would add it to the contents of the washer through a strainer, since it tended to form clumps sometimes.  Then she would agitate the clothes for a few minutes until they were all coated with starch.  Then they went through the ringer and in the basket for the clothesline.  Here is a picture of the starch box that I remember:

Colors were done in much the same way, but in warm water and with no Purex.  Depending on the item, they might have or have not gotten starch.  For example, things like bedspreads did not, but my brother’s blue jeans did.

Then everything went out to the clothesline.  On a sunny summer day they would dry quickly, even in the stifling humidity of west central Arkansas.  Ma did not believe in having a given “washing day” but rather would wash when the weather was fair.  In the winter it took a long time for clothes to dry, but they would dry.

At the time fabric softener was beginning to catch on, and Ma would put it in the rinse for clothes that were not starched.  Even with fabric softener, line dried fabrics tend to be stiffer and rougher than clothes dried in a dryer, but you use what you have.

After the clothes were dry, Ma would take them off of the clothesline.  Then she would take them inside and fold or hang the items that were not starched, and put in the hamper the ones that the birds had soiled.  Sometimes it was not too bad and she would just take a damp cloth and wipe away the excrement.

Now comes the heavy lifting!  The starched clothes then had to be ironed, but you can not iron them directly off of the clothesline.  They had to be sprinkled with clean water and then allowed to “ripen”, meaning that the moisture had to equilibrate throughout the items.  That often took a couple of hours.

Here is an image of the actual sprinkler that Ma used and that I still have.  The sprinkler itself is just the little aluminum top with a cork ring that seals it into the 28 fluid ounce ginger ale bottle.  These are easily over 50 years old.  I have seen plastic sprinkler caps in stores, but not for many years.

Then she would start ironing, in no particular order of items unless the beds needed new linens.  Ironing took hours and hours, and in the summer with no air conditioning was very hot work.  I remember seeing sweat dripping off of her nose sometimes when she ironed.  Lots of times she would wait until after dark to iron when it was cooler and we were running the attic fan, or otherwise my mum would iron after dinner.

One incident about ironing happened to me personally, and I barely remember it.  I must have been around two or so.  My mum was ironing something, I remember not what it was, and I was toddling around the room.  For some reason I pulled on the cord to the iron and it was coming towards me.  In 1959 irons were HEAVY, not like the ones that are popular now.  She did the only thing that she could:  barelegged (she always took off her hose after work, and women did not wear pants then) she deflected the iron away from my face.  She also knocked me down in the process, but little ones are built close to the floor.  When I fell, the iron clipped the very end of my left thumb and burnt it a bit, but also cut it because at the time irons were pretty sharp.  I still have the scar and would publish a picture but I recently burnt that thumb when I tried to burn down my kitchen, so the remnants of the blister has obscured the scar.  When it heals fully I shall post a picture.

After each item was ironed, it either got folded or put on a hanger to go to the closet.  That is how it was done in the day.  When we moved back to Hackett in 1964 after the two or three years in North Little Rock, the first thing that my mum and Ma demanded was hookups for an automatic washing machine and a clothes dryer, since we had on in the house there.  Dad wanted to keep them happy, and got Lester, the son of my Great Aunt Edna and a plumber, to make it so.  Soon we had a new Kenmore automatic washing machine and matching dryer, in avocado, a very popular color at the time.  Ma still used the clothesline from time to time, claiming that the clothes were fresher after air drying, but finally abandoned it.

To recap, let us step through the process of washing a load of, say white bed linens then and now, viz:

Then:  Carry hot water from the kitchen sink to fill the washing machine, probably taking 20 minutes because of the time that it took to fill multiple buckets of water.

Now:  Set the dials on the washer to fill it with hot water.  Filling takes about five minutes, and no manual labor.

Then:  Add whatever additives to the washer, run it a couple of minutes, then add detergent, and then the clothes.  After a few minutes of washing, then add diluted bleach.  Probably five to seven minutes total.

Now:  The same, except the bleach goes into a dispenser and the fabric softener into another one at the start of the wash.  I keep with the custom of adding diluted bleach after five minutes because I find bleach dispensers tend to do a poor job.  Likely the same five to seven minutes.

Then:  Add the clothes and run the washer for, say, 15 minutes.  Then drain the washer manually, and refill with rinse water.  Add some hot water as well, then rinse.  Then drain the washer and refill it, this time with cold water and add the starch.  After that rinse, wring the clothes.  Elapsed time, around 60 minutes.

Now:  Add the clothes and run the washer for however long you selected.  Then it automatically goes to the rinse cycle and does a spin dry.  Elapsed time, around 25 minutes, but no work is involved after the clothes go into the washer.

Then:  Put the clothes into a basket to take to the clothesline, then hang them on it.  Then let them dry.  Elapsed time around eight hours on a hot day in my climate.

Now:  Transfer the clothes to the dryer and start the dryer.  Elapsed time around 75 minutes.

Then:  Take the clothes off of the line, bring them in, sprinkle them, and iron and fold or hang them.  Elapsed time around three hours.

Now:  Take the clothes out of the dryer and hang or fold them.  Elapsed time around five minutes.

Things have changed a LOT!  I realize that the line drying time is “slack” time as is the dryer time, but the overall process is much longer and much more labor intensive the old way, in many respects because of the advent of permanent press fabrics.  Perhaps that is a good topic for Pique the Geek sometime.  What say you?

I must say that there are a couple of hazards with the wringer washers.  First, there is no safety interlock, so they would operate without the lid being down (and there was no lid).  That is not really that serious, because the potential for injury comes mostly from the high speed spin cycle, not the wash cycle.  Before the interlock was introduced in automatic washers, there were more than a few broken arms when people would for some reason or another get entangled with spinning clothes.

Second, the wringer could be dangerous.  Someone who I know well told me that her grandmum was wringing clothes one day and got her breast caught in the wringer!  She was able to disengage the wringer, but only after getting a very painful injury.  It was sort of like a mammogram on steroids.

Well, there you have it about the old ways.  If you have any memories to share, not necessarily about washing clothes, please share them in the comments.  Both other readers and I like to share such things.

Warmest regards,

Doc, aka Dr. David W. Smith

Crossposted at

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