A few gas and electric clothes dryers were starting to show up in rich folks’ homes around the country when I was growing up, but they had not made it to our neighborhood near the paper mill.
Nearly every back yard of that three-street subdivision of little frame houses had several rows of wires attached to T-shaped iron poles. Those webs of taut wiring served as outdoor clothes dryers.
When the temperature, sun, wind and other conditions were perfect, things that were dried on the clothes lines turned out soft, fresh and fragrant and ready to wear to school and church.
But outdoor clothes-drying conditions were unfavorable more days than not. My mother had to work around rain, continual trash fires and smoke and chemical emissions from the paper mill to get our clothes dried.
Weather-forecasting was not as sophisticated then as it is now, so freshly-washed clothes that she hung out to dry were drenched pretty often by unexpected rain.
There seemed to be more cold weather in those days. I recall times when batches of wet laundry on the clothes lines would freeze solid when sudden cold fronts blew through.
But the biggest obstacles to getting clothes from the washing machine dry before everybody had clothes dryers were smoke and liquor that caused my church-going mother to use terrible words like damn a time or two.
There were big smokestacks at the mill that gushed thick white smoke all day every day, and the smoke was accompanied by a mist of brown liquid that all the mill families called liquor.
That harsh, foul-smelling chemical fallout from paper making could take the paint off houses and cars. It would sting our skin if it fell on us when we were out playing, and my mother said it ate holes in bedsheets, towels and my dad’s khakis on the clothes lines.
Neighborhood ladies watched the wind before hanging clothes out to dry to make sure the mill smoke was going the other way. If the direction of the wind shifted toward our house, my mother drafted all of us into service to get the laundry off the lines.
There were no waste management or garbage collection systems back then. Every household had 55-gallon drums in their back yard that they used to burn garbage.
Leaves, limbs and other debris from yards were raked into piles in drainage ditches around our homes and burned.
If smoke from trash piles or garbage barrels drifted toward our house when laundry was hanging out, everybody in the family scrambled to get the clothes off the lines and back in the house.
Even with all those complications, my mother still managed to send my dad off to work every day in neat, crisp starched and ironed khaki pants and shirts, and she kept my brother and me in clean school clothes.
But the outdoor clothes-drying system of wires and poles caused almost as many problems for kids in the neighborhood as it did for our mothers.
Nearly all the younger guys crashed into those heavy pipes when they were chasing pop flies or long passes in backyard ballgames. We often got tangled up in wet clothes and left laundry scattered in the dirt and grass under the clotheslines.
Boys would run full speed into the wires on their bicycles and backflip heels over head into a heap after being “clotheslined.”
Most of our mothers used some metal devices called pants stretchers in those days to put sharp creases in jeans and khakis. Pants with the stretchers in them were hanging on most clothes lines.
Heavily starched trousers with razor-edged creases formed by the pants stretchers posed a serious threat to kids running through the laundry in their back yards.
This retrospective underscores the fact that lives of people of every generation are enhanced and enriched by the invention and acquisition of new and better stuff. Young folks today can’t wait for the latest phones, computers and other cutting edge devices.
Those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s were there when things like super glue, Slinkys, color television, Tupperware, hula hoops, barbie dolls and McDonalds hamburgers came along.
I remember my mother saying many times that clothes dryers were the best invention ever, and she might have been right.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES