Remember traditional ‘wash day’

In days gone by, traditionally, Monday was Wash Day in the Ozarks for farm families in our part of the country. Monday was the time to gather together all the dirty laundry in the house, a week’s worth, and wash everything clean for the week to come. In the days before washing machines, that usually meant getting the big black pot situated over a fire, gathering the wood for the fire, drawing many gallons of water from the well or from the family water spring, heating the water to a brisk boil. Most families I think had a scrub board for use in scrubbing the clothes that needed special attention. One would get out the lye soap, if you had it, lather up the clothes with the soap, and give them a good scrubbing on the board. Then you gave the clothes a good rinsing, to wash away the soap suds and any loosened soil.

Of course in those days gone by we didn’t talk quite the way most of us do today. For most people of the Ozarks, and Texas, too, Wash Day was actually “Worsh Day.” Instead of washing your clothes, you “worshed ’em.” Instead of rinsing them, you “rainched ’em;” that is, you gave ’em a good “rainchin’” before hanging ’em on the “line,” the clothes line. Actually most of us didn’t pernounce c-l-o-t-h-e-s as clothes, it was “cloos” that you wore to work or to go places, or just to hang out. It was common to wear your britches for a week, and then “worsh ’em,” whether they really needed “worshin’” or not.

I note that, today, with the prevalence of automatic washers, families usually don’t have any regular wash day. They just throw in a load whenever the hamper collects enough laundry for a load. Today, you put your clothes in the washer, put in the detergent, choose the settings and push the on button. Then you can go off and do other things while the washer runs its cycle. Families today also commonly wash clothes much more often than families of old did. In the old days, many wore clothes for several days, possibly a week, changing only for wash day or if the clothes became obviously dirty. Work clothes were usually worn for a week whether they became dirty or not. After all, they were work clothes, which meant that they were for getting dirty, doing farm chores, plowing fields, cultivating garden, milking and feeding livestock, and so on. It is hard to do those things without getting dirty.

There has been quite a change over the years in the suds used to wash clothes. The earliest clothes washing soap that I remember was either lye soap or P & G soap. The P & G was for Proctor and Gamble. In the early 1940s, we were also seeing several brands of laundry detergent on the market. I think I remember DUZ and AJAX and OXYDOL; and there were several others that I can’t bring back to mind. My mother eventually began using TIDE pretty consistently with our wringer washer. We never had an automatic washer so long as I was home, because our well couldn’t supply enough water to support the automatic machine.

Some of us remember the old wringer type washing machines out of some unpleasant experience with them. The wringer was invented before it was matched with a washing machine. Some of the early wringers would be attached to a tub for the purpose of squeezing the water out of the clothes as you moved them from wash tub to rinse tub. Our own earliest washer was a Montgomery Ward wringer washer with a small gas engine to drive it. We didn’t have electricity on the farm until 1945. When we did get electricity, an electric motor quickly replaced the hard-to-start little gas motor. One of the problems with wringer washers was that you could pretty easily get your hand caught in the wringer rollers, and that was very unpleasant. Thankfully, many of the washers were equipped with a release bar, which you very quickly reached for with the other hand if the wringer grabbed your fingers. The release was a great relief, but it took awhile for the pain of a roller squeeeze to go away.

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