Someone sent me this list of facts about hanging clothes when we were young. Some of it I deleted because it didn't really apply, and then I added some things. Washing clothes was a weekly chore, always on Mondays, and procrastinating to another day just was not done. This was a "must" on Mondays. And, this is the way it was for everyone. All the clothes lines on our block and the blocks around us were full of clean clothes on Monday mornings.
1. You had to wash the clothes lines before hanging any clothes by walking the entire length of each line with a damp cloth around the lines. Most of the time my mother insisted that it be done twice, just to be sure they were clean enough.
2. You had to hang the clothes in a certain order, and always hang "whites" with "whites," and hang them first. Now, the reason this was done was because they were hung as they came out of the washer. Whites were always washed first because it was a wringer washer, and so the water was cleanest, and you never washed colored clothes with whites.
3. You never hung a shirt by the shoulders, always by the tail! The clothes pins caused indentations and creases in clothes. They were ironed out, but it was better to not have the crease in the shoulders.
4. Wash day is on a Monday! It was too much work to set up the wringer washer more than once a week, and Monday was a good day to start the week off with clean clothes. It was all done in one day, and ironed the next day.
5. Hang the sheets and towels on the outside lines so you could hide your "unmentionables" in the middle. This really wasn't a big deal to my mom, but the sheets were the first load, hung first, and so were on the outside line.
6. It didn't matter if it was sub zero weather. Clothes would "freeze-dry." Sometimes you could wear gloves to hang them, but it was tedious and took longer. When the clothes were dry they were stiff as a board and rough. Ironing took that all out.
6. It didn't matter if it was sub zero weather. Clothes would "freeze-dry." Sometimes you could wear gloves to hang them, but it was tedious and took longer. When the clothes were dry they were stiff as a board and rough. Ironing took that all out.
7. Always gather the clothes pins when taking down dry clothes. Pins left on the lines got dirty and that wasn't good for clean clothes. Mom always sewed her clothespin bags fashioned from scraps of material and resembling the one shown here. We had a lot of clothespins, and the bag had to be substantial.
8. If you were efficient, you would line the clothes up so that each item did not need two clothes pins, but shared one of the clothes pins with the next washed item. It saved clothes pins, and it saved space on the line.
9. Clothes were put into the basket, folded and put away or ironed. The clothes that were to be ironed were usually sprayed or sprinkled with a water bottle, rolled up and put in a basket. Damp clothes are easier to iron than dry.
10. There also were clothesline poles with a notch in the top to prop up the line in different places along the line to keep it from getting too heavy and allowing clothes to drag on the ground.
12. The clothes always smelled of the great outdoors. When I crawled into bed on Monday nights and smelled my clean pillow cases and sheets it was the freshest smell in the world.
