Laundry Day

Today is Monday and there was a time in America when that meant one thing; Laundry Day !

This was a time before the automatic washing machine and gas or electric clothes dryer. As a young man I watched my Grandmother wash clothes the old fashioned way. Believe me it was quite a chore and the whole day was devoted to doing it. The first thing was to bring out and set up the wash tub,the wringer and the rinse tub. Heat the water on the kitchen stove and fill the tubs. My Grandmother has a complete set up that looked something like this. She also had a separate tub filled with hot water and something called bluing that made your whites white. Two kinds of soap were used. Both of them were bar type soaps that you shaved flakes off to put in the water. Fels Naptha soap and Octagon soap. Fels Naptha was used for pretreating and stain removal and the Octagon soap for regular washing.

I can vividly recall both bars of soap. Fels Naptha had a strong smell and was a yellowish color and the Octagon soap was a shade of brown.

Once everything was prepared you took the clothes,one piece at a time,and put them in the wash water.A good scrubbing on the wash board and then run through the wringer.Into the rinse water,repeat the process and wring out again. After this ,if needed it went into the bluing,and the process was repeated again. Now take them out to the clothesline for drying. Be careful not to drop them or have them hang too low as they will get in the mud and you will have to start over ! When they are dried they can be carried back inside for ironing. My Grandmother never used an electric iron ! She did try it once and declared it to be much too light to be of any real use so she used the cast iron ones that were heated on the stove. There would be a whole row of them in different sizes depending upon the area to be ironed.
I watched my Grandmother do this many times because she also did laundry for other people as a means of support. Doing the laundry was a job back then. Later on she did get an automatic washer,a Maytag,with a wringer on the top and would occasionally use that. She said it didn't get the clothes as clean but with ten kids it did help with Laundry Day.
What a far cry from today. In some neighborhoods today you can not hang out laundry at all. My mother used a washing machine but for many years the clothes were hung out to dry. I used to help with that chore. I still get a warm feeling seeing clothes moving in the breeze on Laundry Day.