“Hanging out shirts in the dirty breeze”
Oh sure, you see movies about the old West and women are hanging out wash, but it wasn’t that long ago that everyone did it, all over America.
Our houses all came with a wash line–and I mean every one. It was a must-have. Not having one was like having a car without seats. The 7-foot iron poles were buried deep in the backyard and surrounded with concrete. A sturdy plastic-sheathed wire connected them–around 20 feet long.
You bought your own tin ‘prop’ poles. These were poles at least eight feet long with a ‘U’ at the top that went under the line and pushed it high off the ground. This was a must have for hanging sheets, blankets, pillow cases, etc.
Another must-have was a hanging cloth basket shaped like a large pants pocket. This held clothespins. Any woman worthy of being a sixties lady had a batch of 20-30. Two types of clothespins–the ‘alligator’ ones with a steel spring to hold it closed, and the one piece ones that had two long ‘buck teeth’. The latter were cheaper, because they: a) were easily dislodged by wind, and b) broke easily.
While it saved money to hang clothes (dryers are electricity eaters), there were issues, mainly summer rains. If you started dinner and/or had other things to do, summer storms soaked everything on the line, so they had to stay out twice as long. Or, in my house, you threw the wet clothes in the dryer before daddy came home and insulted you for letting everything get soaked. Many was the day when I’d run and grab clothes with thunder overhead.
There were few simpler pleasures when you were 4 or 5 than running through someone’s sheets on a line, playing games and imagined fun in foreign lands.
The folks with huge households had the Cadillac models–a four sided wash line, anchored by a center pole. Each side of the square had 2 or 3 lines progressively higher (each side was around 4 feet across.). And the whole thing rotated so you didn’t have to change positions. When not in use, it became a dandy toy, for us kids without a playground. Even if the owners didn’t have kids, we would play with the wash poles while they worked in the summer.
Nowhere else to musically go with this, I suppose……….