The Washing Machine by Sylvia

So the story goes, Mama had been in the middle of washing the family laundry when she went into labor with me. As I recall, all during my life time, Mama always did our family laundry on Monday mornings. My birthday, September 1, 1931 fell on a Thursday. I suppose that there must have been more than one wash day for the Jones family before the washing machine. Before my birth there was a family of five, two parents and three children. Herbert Jr, age nine, Edward age eight and little sister Florence age six.

Mama had been down stair in the basement washing the family laundry on a washboard in her new modern stationary tubes with both hot and cold running water. I guess, they referred to these new tubes as stationary to let it be known that they weren’t tin tubes.

Although America was in the middle of the great depression and in 1932 there were eleven million Americans out of work, Daddy and Mama had just had our home built in 1930. Thank God for the US government and Daddy’s great Aunt, we were able to have a brand new house. The government employed Daddy and our great, great Aunt gave Mama and daddy the land to construct the house on. Prior to 1930, my parents and family lived in the home of daddy’s parents and then later in my mother’s parents home. I was the first and last child to be born after our family moved into our new home.
Well, house chores in our home were always gender specific. Washing was always a job assigned to women and men washed windows as well as scrubbed the floors.
After I made my entrance into the world and daddy returned home from the hospital, the family wash had to be completed. Daddy completed the family wash by hand, hung the clothes out in the backyard to dry and immediately went out and purchased the washing machine.

I presume that the new washing machine came from Sears and Roebuck store, since just about everything in our house was purchased from that store. Clothing, spring plants, baby chicks, hot water heaters and even in the 1940’s and 1950’s my sister and I both received Mouton lamb coats during our junior year in college.

The washing machine became an integral part of my life until my early teens when daddy replaced the old washing machine with a “bendix” washer that did everything except bring the laundry up the basement stairs and hang it on the back yard clothes line.

The rule was that clothing must be clean and bright and hung out neatly on the line as early as possible.

Our first washing machine was a round cylinder shaped tube with an agitator in the center and on an upper side of the machine was a wringer and clothing was feed into the wringer by hand twice once to remove soapy water and the second time to remove the rinse water. The machine was filled with the water from a hose attached to a facet and emptied by a pump into the stationary tubes years before the Bendix was purchased the pump broke down and water was removed by hand. This was a coveted job of the children. I was the last child who helped with this chore watching and helping Mama wash was always a joy for me.