Laundry Day – 1940’s

The chore of doing laundry has progressed from slapping clothes on a rock in a stream or lake, and has been upgraded through the years. I am old enough to remember when people used a washboard/scrub board and a tub of water. I even remember when several ladies in the neighborhood built a fire in the alley and made their own soap. They had a large metal tub over the fire, and I think they used lye, wood ashes, water and some other ingredients. They would stir and stir the concoction for hours, then make bars of soap.

Speaking of soap, my brother Paul and I were given the task each laundry day of taking large bars of Fels Naphtha soap and shaving slivers off of it to put in the Maytag washing machine.

My Mom grew up in Moroni, Utah when the laundry was done on a scrub board. When we lived in McGill’s townsite area on #26 E Row she had a Maytag.

What a difference. We lived there from 1937 to 1944. I remember her pushing the washer to the back door and carrying water in buckets to fill it. After the wash cycle, she drained it into the back yard, then filled it with clean water to rinse the clothes. After rinsing, she ran the clothes through the rubber wringers. Then, she carried the clothes out to the wire clothesline in the yard. She hung them on the wire using clothes pins. When the dust from the tailings would come up, she had to get the clothes in the house and take them out again after the wind died down.

When we moved to 1st street, she still had the washer.

When WWII (for some of the intellectually deficient youngsters of today, that was WW2 not WW eleven), was finally over, many wonderful improvements were made in home laundry chores.

A big improvement was the installation of hot and cold water faucets on the back porch. Mom could fill the washer with a rubber hose instead of a bucket. Next step was a floor drain to empty the washer. Another improvement was a two-compartment tub on wheels that she could put next to the washer and run the soapy clothes through the wringer and into some rinse water in one tub and then run the clothes through the wringer into the second tub of clear water with some bluing in it to white and brighten the clothes. Then she ran the clothes through the wringer again and put them in a clothes basket to haul down the back stairs to the clothesline.

Then the great leap to an automatic washing machine. She still had to haul the clothes out to the clothesline.

The final step was an automatic dryer. She had gone from a scrub board to an automatic washer and dryer during her lifetime.