Photo: Wilson’s Laundromat, The stories this place could tell.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
My first time home from college I took a bag of dirty laundry to Mom. She tossed it out the door.
“You’re education has just begun. From now on wash your own clothes.”
Thus did I join laundry’s long, illustrious history, which is arduous. The first laundromats were creeks and rivers. Get down by the creek and beat those garments on rocks. Beat ’em with sticks. Even better boil some water and get some lye soap and elbow grease. Apply liberally.
Before electric washing machines arrived having clean clothes meant a grueling process. It began with soaking clothes for 24 hours, scrubbing them against rocks, rinsing them, and wringing them out by hand. Folks even stomped the dirt out of clothes. They used most any trick to clean clothes, including peeing on them. That’s right, peeing. Urine contains ammonia and it dissolves grease and fats.
Talk about a memory. Back in my adult apartment complex days at a place called Crossroads we had several laundromats. One night a country boy called Catfish came in drunk. He thought it’d be funny to pee in one of the dryers filled with clean clothes. The word got around. We quit using that laundromat. Too close to Catfish’s apartment.
Washing clothes in the old days amounted to seven steps and two days’ work. Pre-wash, soak 24 hours, wash with lye, wash again to remove lye residue, rinse, wring by hand for two hours, air dry for six to 24 hours. Whew. This is exhausting. Let’s add an eighth stage. Lie down and rest.
All this history with dirty laundry came to me when I photographed Wilson’s Laundry in Pomaria. Just like that I tripped down memory lane. I saw Mom tossing my clothes out the door. I saw the pea sheller Dad made from a wringer machine’s rollers. It smashed as many peas as it popped across the porch. You had to fold clothes just so to keep wringers from cracking buttons.
Then I remembered how some lowlife stole my clothes from a dryer in Columbia, taking the best white linen shirt I ever had.
Laundry memories kept coming. Mom used Tide, nothing but Tide. “If it’s got to be clean, it’s got to be Tide.” Monday was wash day. Start the week with clean laundry. “Tide in, dirt out.”
What I best remember about my childhood laundry days is the clothesline. Back then we all had one. Bringing in dry clothes wasn’t work. It was a memorable experience. Those fresh, stiff-with-sunlight clothes seemed cleaner than clean. They rustled when you took them from the line where wooden clothespins held them. When a summer storm blew up it was all hands on deck to get the clothes in.
Years ago on a back-road ramble I spied a clothes line with whites flying in the wind like an armada at sea. Took me right back to youth, and I caught the fragrance of Mom’s clean clothes, towels, and sheets.
Recently I bought a new washer and dryer. They sure beat the old laundromat with its deadbeats looking to steal your clothes. Laundromat etiquette required you not to leave your clothes in a dryer. Etiquette? More like common sense to me.
The other thing is the feeling laundromats gave me. I never felt more alone than when sitting in a laundromat. As I watched the clothes spin, listened to the machines, and watched strangers come and go, boyhood seemed a 100 years in the past. I’d look out the windows and see traffic and utility poles. Asphalt and cement. No grass. No clothesline. It made me feel like I’d taken a wrong turn in life somewhere.
It wasn’t until I bought a Kenmore washer and dryer that I felt I had arrived as an adult. Mom would have said my education was complete at long last.
