Appliances

Life was simpler, before appliances. You might not believe that I'm old enough to remember, but I am.

You see, while I was growing up, some homes actually did have TV, washers, and dryers, even dishwashers!   Not everyone could afford them, though.  My parents didn't usually have to cope with broken appliances, for the simple reason that they usually didn't have any appliances at all, to speak of.

Most folks couldn't afford a TV until (in my view, at the time) they were too old to appreciate it - why on earth would you want to watch I Love Lucy, or The Ed Sullivan Show? Valuable viewing time should be reserved for important programming, like Superman, or Disneyland!  My grandparents, who were among those who could and did have television, indulged me some, but not always.

This is not to say that my parent's home never had a TV.  Dad would sometimes happen on a deal on a used (read, used-up!) set, and bring it home.  It would run for awhile, but then, inevitably, it would break.  Dad was an electrician, but not an electronics engineer. He tried, but usually failed, to fix them.  The best he could do was replace burned-out vacuum tubes (I'll bet many of you don't even know what those are!).

Anyway, the upshot is that most of my life, before age 18, was spent without significant influence from television. Instead, I read.  Lots of stuff, including stuff my folks would have had a hernia over, but that's another story.

Before home appliances, people washed clothes by hand.  My mother did this quite often when I was a child.  In some places, you could take your clothes to a laundromat, but that always cost money.  There are still aa few of these around, I've seen them, mostly in the less-affluent communities. Sometimes a member of the extended family would have the good fortune to acquire a washing machine.

Note, I did not say an automatic clothes washer.  Those are two different things.  If you ever watch old movies, or even period movies, you might have seen a washing machine.  It has a horizontal tub and an agitator, like today's top-loading washers, but the top is often uncovered.  You filled the tub manually, usually with a garden hose, and turned off the flow when the tub was sufficiently full.

Attached to the top edge of the tub was a mechanism many younger folks have never seen - a wringer!  It had two horizontal rollers, powered by the machine's motor, an it's purpose was to squeeze excess water out of clothes, after they had agitated long enough in the machine.

The wringer generally pivoted around the attachment point, and if you (or your relatives) were well off, you might have two or three number 3 washtubs as well.  You arranged these tubs around the pivot point of the wringer, and you could set up a number of sequential washer-loads of clothes, each at a different stage of the process - of course, there wasn't an agitator in the number 3 tubs, so if you needed to help the rinse cycle along, you provide agitation manually.

Now about dryers - the real reason for this blog, is my frustration with a clothes dryer.  Before dryers were a fixture in practically every home, clothes were hung on a clothesline to dry, or dried at the laudromat.  My wife and I actually did this ourselves, until after our youngest child was born.

We bought our first electric dryer from Sears, and it lasted almost nineteen years, before it began to have problems, then, like the infamous One Horse Shay, it turned into dust practically overnight.

Believe it or not, we're still using our second-ever home clothes dryer. It's a Whirlpool, and last Tuesday, it began to give us problems... nothing is made to last anymore!  Anyway, being the son of an electrician, and frequently being drafted as the electrician's helper, has had it's benefits.  I was able to isolate the problem with the dryer, and the replacement part is now on order.  Hopefully, in a day or two, it'll be back up and running.

I'll get over it, although it's a pain.

Mariner