When Stan and I were married in February of 1977, I was morphed back into depression era living, in some ways. My first car was a bright orange Opal Rally (I need to find an image for that...way cool), Stan had a little Datson pickup, yes it was a Datson, not a Nisson! They were very modern, contemporary, vogue, however you want to say it.
Laundry on the other hand, was going to be a totally new experience for me, way different! The house we moved into was Stan's grandparents, who had been dead for quite some time. The house was quite antiquated and had been empty for some time. We had an old coal oil stove in the front room, and the rest of the house was a freezer in the winter, and it was winter when we got married. I think one of my best qualities is that I have taken what was available at the time and made do with it. I don't even think I complained much, you'll have to ask Stan. We had a very old bathroom set up. The tub was so rust encrusted from the water, it looked like someone had done an art deco design. I need to add here that I have never been a fond of art deco. I remember scrubbing for hours with cleanser and bleach. NOTHING would take out the rust. This was in the years before CLR and other rust removing miracles. In the shop, there was a bottle of Naval Jelly. I don't know if that is produced anymore, but when I read the label, it said something about being able to remove rust, but it was corrosive and needed to be handled with care. It was a pink jellied concoction with a brush in the lid for application. I knew that whatever happened, the tub couldn't look any worse. I slathered it on lavishly!! Waited about 10 minutes, washed it out...wa la the stains were lighter! I went through 2 or 3 bottles over a several week period, and the tub was white again, almost.
But I digress. In that tiny bathroom, there was an old wringer washer. Growing up, we had regular washers, but in the basement, there was an old wringer washer...so I HAD seen one before and knew what it was. But, I didn't know how to use one. I learned! The rinse tub was, you may have guessed, the bath tub! It didn't do a lot of wash at a time. After things had swished around for as long as I thought was necessary in the soapy water, I would feed the clothes between the rubber rollers to squeeze the water out, plop the clothes in the bathtub full of clean water, empty the wash water in the toilet, then put the rinsed out clothes through the wringer again. I have always had a little OCD about laundry, the house, NO, laundry, yes, I would generally rinse the clothes two or three times. Wringer washers were truly a throw back, for most, to depression era times. Doing laundry was tedious, and took a long time, but the clothes were clean! To my knowledge, I was the only one anywhere to be using what was a state of the art, most wonderful invention ever, after rocks in a stream and washboards in a bucket 50 years prior!
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Then...you guessed it, my dryer was the great out doors! My lines looked very similar to the ones above. When the twins arrived in October, yes 8 months, 8 days after we were married (I told people they could pay the hospital bills, if they were counting fingers), I had a LOT of diapers to wash. All of my friends were using the new invention of disposable diapers, but they were far too expensive for us, so, it was cloth diapers, with diaper laundry almost everyday! Stacks and stacks of them! Do you know how many cloth diapers a baby can go through in a day? I figured I had 30 to 40 diapers a day to wash. Believe it or not, even cloth diapers have been improved upon! My daughter Rachel uses them and loves them. They are much more absorbent, etc. than 34+ years ago!
Did I mention they were born in October? We brought them home from the hospital in December. December is in the winter. Winter in Sugarville, Utah was really cold, many times below freezing at night and never getting above freezing during the day! So, my drying of diapers had to be a little creative. I would freeze my fingers to almost frost bite condition, not to mention hypothermia for the rest of my body, pinning them on the clothes line...where they would, you guessed it, freeze dry. By the time I got to the bottom of the basket, it was hard to shake them out to even hang them! After a few hours, I would repeat the frost bite/hypothermia routine and bring in stiff, frozen diapers. They did not flap in the wind! If they were flapping, and I was too close, they could have knocked me out! I would then put them by the coal oil stove until they were malleable, then drape them over a wooden rack, like the one below, to finish drying. When Richard was born in August of 1979, Isaac and Alex were 22 months old, and I had three children in cloth diapers! That might have been the time I started doing erratic things, like knocking my head into the wall, wishing for a knock out!
We finally did get an old washer from Stan's parents, when they bought a new one, but it wasn't until Phillip was 1.5 years old that we got a dryer!
When we did have the ability to buy a washer and dryer set the summer of 1982, I thought I had died and gone to laundry heaven! You can never imagine how wonderful some things are...unless you have had to live without them. That particular set lasted us until I think 2000. Part of that time, it was in the dairy barn, where it was used twice a day to wash the cloths we used to clean the cows udders with. It was a large capacity unit, which was so wonderful! With 8 in the family, I was doing 2 to 3 loads of laundry a day! Laundry was one of those things that was never done!
In 2002, we bought an unbelievably wonderful new front loading set. It could do double the capacity of the large capacity that I had before. At that time, with only 3 in the house, I only did 1 or maybe 2 loads of laundry a week. It's amazing how the evolution of things made it to where when I had the most capacity and best convenience, I needed it the least! But, I wouldn't trade it for anything.
When Stan and I were in Ukraine, we did have washing machines in our apartments, except for the last one. But even though they were modern, they were so tiny, we had several loads a week...and hung them on the line. We were living in a courtyard area guarded by all of the Babushkas (Grandmothers). Even though I had done a lot of line hanging in my life, I found out I had been doing it wrong the entire time! I was instructed by these good ladies, that a wooden pole was needed to hold up the center of the line. It's funny, I didn't understand Russian, and they thought that if they just talked louder and louder I would understand. However, when it got to almost a yelling fit, they took me out for visual instruction. That worked. When we had hung up our clothes and had to be late coming home on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we would find our laundry missing. The first time this happened, we were like, great, our clothes have been stolen! But within minutes of getting home, one of our neighbors would come with our laundry in their arms! Needless to say, unless it was an after thought, we were careful of the days we hung out our clothes. No Pitbull could have ever guarded our courtyard better than these sweet ladies. We were taken care of.
In Nicolaev, our last area, we didn't have a washer and Stan, bless his heart, did our laundry by hand in the bathtub...a blast from the past!
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