When laundry was a family affair

Saturday was laundry day, when Momma had us five kids put boxes and paper sacks of sheets and towels, socks and slacks, shirts and skirts into the car and then we all piled in and drove five miles from Rocky Branch to Daingerfield, where there was a laundry.

The laundry wasn’t a Laundromat like you see today. There were no square, automatic washing machines and no dryers of any kind. Washing machines then were round and you filled them by turning on hot water and cold water to make warm water. There was a drain hose attached to the bottom and hooked to the top, and you unhooked the hose and lowered it and water drained from the machine.

There weren’t any slots for quarters, either, but a man or a woman who took cash money.

The laundry in Daingerfield was a white wooden building beneath trees and next to a creek. The building had screened-in sides to keep flies out and let in whatever breeze happened to be blowing. There were eight washing machines.

With five kids and Momma and Daddy, we had quite a bit of laundry. Momma sorted everything into whites, darks and colors and put each kind in a box or in paper sacks. At the laundry, she would pay for two or more washing machines and then fill each with a load of clothes. Then she put hoses in the washing part and turned on the water. When the water was high enough, she put in Ivory Soap flakes and turned on the machine.

Those machines did not have safety features to keep unobservant or clumsy kids from falling in. There was no lid, nor any kind of automatic shut off. The agitator kept going, no matter how many kids might fall in.

The machines had rollers at the top to squeeze water from whatever had been washed. After draining wash water and filling with rinse water and then draining that, you would turn on the rollers and take a towel and feed the towel into the rollers and take it from the other side. There were rumors of people sometimes getting fingers caught in the rollers and the rollers taking an arm all the way to the elbow before someone turned them off.

The rollers would not take blue jeans or sheets. Those we had to wring out by hand and then put in a box. All of the washed laundry went wet into boxes. Momma and Carolyn hung the laundry on clothes lines at home.

Sometimes Momma didn’t have enough money for going to the laundry. Those Saturdays, she built a fire in the back yard and had me drag the wash pot to the fire. The wash pot was a big iron pot; the same kind people used to render fat at hog-butchering time and to boil corn in lye water to make hominy.

After dragging the pot to the fire, I put the galvanized metal wash tub next to the well and drew water with rope, pulley and bucket and filled the tub about two-thirds. Carolyn and I carried the tub to the pot and poured in the water. That took two trips, and then I filled the tub again for cold rinse water.

When the water got to boiling in the wash pot, Momma put in soap flakes. The soap boiled into big waves of bubbles.

All the clothes got boiled. Momma used a sawed off broken broom handle to stir the clothes and take the clothes from the pot and put into the cold rinse water. When the clothes were rinsed enough, we wrung out as much water as we could and then hung everything on the clothes line.

Doing laundry was a family operation. Everybody had a job to do. We didn’t like the work, but it was necessary.