When I was a kid, I remember when Dad’s cousin gave us a used wringer washing machine. We were so excited. It was used but it was in really good shape. It was a funny looking thing, but it sure beat washing with an old washboard and wringing out the clothes by twisting them to get the water out.
It was like a pasta machine in that you put the item from the wash tub into the wringer to get the water squeezed out, much like putting the dough into the pasta machine to get the dough a desired thickness. It was fun and something new, and I volunteered to help wring out the clothes. When I was home, that became my job, wringing out the clothes. I had forgotten just how heavy wet clothes are.
In the rear of our two-story house in the Excelsior district of SF, we had a little wash room and outside of that a little porch just big enough for maybe three people, brooms, mops, and bags of clothes pins and located at the top of the outside back stairs.
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My older brother and I would sometimes be out on the back porch, holding the broom handle and pretending it was a microphone and we were singers. Our favorite tunes in those days performed by a duo were the Everly Brothers tunes “Bye Bye Love” or “Wake Up Little Suzie.” We must have envisioned ourselves on the Ed Sullivan Show. Many of the other family variety shows on television in those days were The Milton Berle Show, Your Show of Shows, Hit Parade, and Perry Como and we knew we were never that good in real life, but in pretend life we could have been contenders.
We never did have a clothes dryer. Many people in those days did not. In SF our home was located on a standard City lot, I am guessing 25 feet by 100 feet on 2/3 acre. From the back porch, everyone had clothes lines strung up from the back window of the porches all the way across the yard. They were two parallel lines with a round metal pulley. Clothes pins fastened the clothes to the line for drying.
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When you washed clothes it depended on the weather. You did not wash on a rainy day because you would not be able to put them out to dry. SF was pretty windy. On a usual day, the wind would wind the sheets around themselves several times. Before you could pull the clothes in, you had to undo the lines to make them whole again or you could not move the lines at all. Sometimes this took a while and it was very frustrating.
Just like usual, when your hands are in soapy water, your rings can come off easily. An awful thing happened to my Mom one day while washing clothes. She didn’t realize it at first, but her wedding ring set, which was soldered together, was no longer on her finger. This sent a wave of panic through my Mom. She had beautiful rings and she was so upset that she lost them. She was almost afraid to tell Dad but she had no choice. She sent Dad to the backyard to try to find her rings, thinking the rings came off while she was hanging the clothes out to dry. Poor Dad practically sifted the dirt all the way in the path of the clothes and then all over the back yard in case the wind took the rings out of the path of the clothes line.
Mom prayed about the rings. It looked like they were lost forever. Mom grew more and more upset as the time went by. She almost could not talk, she was that upset.
Later that day, we retrieved the clothes when they were dry. Again, the clothes were wrapped around the clothes line which required several counter clockwise movements to undo them and reel them in. Mom put them in the laundry basket and started folding clothes with tears in her eyes.
When she got down to the end of the basket, she noticed something strange with my brother’s underpants. Inside the little open area in the front of my brother’s tighty whities there sat the sparking diamond rings. It was a miracle. The ring had a little journey when it came off Mom’s finger after having not been taken off her finger for years and years. It went swimming and went out for a breezy vacation protected by nice folds in the tighty whities. Who would have ever thought that those tighty whities would be the ringer she prayed for. All was well in our household after that and Mom was so thankful that her rings were once again on her finger.
