MONDAY WAS WARSH DAY! This evening as I was ironing an accumulation of cotton tablecloths, linen napkins and the like, it brought my mind back to my growing up in the 1930s and 40s. Back in those days, housewives had a set routine--looking back on it, I swear it must have been the law! Monday: Do the wash (or as Grandma pronounced it, “warsh!”) Tuesday: Iron the clothes Wednesday: Bake the bread Thursday: Go to market?? (OK, I’m lost here!) Now in my day, doing the wash meant getting up early, (Of course! A proper housewife ALWAYS got up early!), stripping the beds of bed linen and gathering up the laundry and sorting it out--whites in one pile, colored in another. And down into the cellar with the whole lot. Fill up the Maytag wringer washer with HOT water and add the soap. (Note, I said “soap,” not detergent! A bit of a comment on soap later). The first to go into the washer were the cotton sheets and pillow cases. Bluing had also been added to the water to whiten everything and then the machine was turned on. Klunka, chunka, swish, swish went the agitator. When she felt the clothes had been in there long enough to be clean, the machine was stopped and it was time to rinse them (“Rench” them, as Grandma would say!). That meant turning on the wringer, gather the sheet in just the right way and feed it through the wringer to wring out the soapsuds. As the wringer pulled the sheet through, there was a galvanized wash tub filled with clear water waiting for it. After the bed linens had been sloshed up an down a number of times by hand, the washing machine wringer was maneuvered so that the linens could be fed through the wringer again and into the wicker clothes basket. (Hmmm, somehow I can picture a second rinse tub but that's what happens when the memory gets dim!) At any rate, out onto the cotton clothes line they went, pinned up with wooden clothes pins to dry. (BTW, not the “snap-type” wooden clothes pins.) Load after load of laundry was washed in the same soapy water and rinse water until every dirty piece of fabric in the house was clean and hanging out on the clothes line. Of course, my mother insisted that my father’s cotton handkerchiefs be “snowy white.” He worked in a factory and wiped his dirty brow frequently; therefore, there was always the large kettle on the stove to boil them in before they went into the washing machine. Now, regarding the soap! All you needed to do was to listen to the radio to find out what soap would clean your clothes the best. During the entire afternoon, you listened to the “Soap Operas!” Why were they called Soap Operas? Well, because almost every one of the 15-minute programs were sponsored by soap manufacturers. And all day long, the housewife stayed tuned to the radio to hear the latest segment of “Stella Dallas” or “One Man’s Family” and all of the rest of them. And while she listened, she took note of the commercials: Buy Duz soap, D U Z does everything! Fels Naptha, Oxydol, etc. Oh, how they all promised to make your clothes so CLEAN!! What a sin it would have been if a neighbor thought your clothes were a tattle-tale gray! When the clothes were dry, they were brought back inside and then were dampened by sprinkling them with water, rolled up tightly and placed back into the clothes basket to be ironed the next day. In addition, and my memory is a bit foggy here, those clothes that needed to be starched (which I seem to recall were MOST of them!) were sloshed up and down in a kettle of warm water with a cake of starch disolved in it on the stove. Come to think of it, I guess that was done before they were hung out on the line. Oh well! And the next day, everything got ironed with the exception of maybe the socks! And so went the average week for the housewife. Happy Labor Day, girls!! :-D Vee