More about Dad, but first,

I know I said I woul continue with Dad but..... I did my washing today and got to thinking how very lucky people are today!!! So, I have to carry my laundry out to a shared laundry room, washing only when someone else hasn't tied the laundry up!!! But that is a minor thing! How many of you out there ever washed your clothes on a good old washboard? Believe me it wasn't fun!! When I was a child and saw my mother doing that I did,t think much about it! It was one of those many things that Moms did in those days, especially if you lived where we did in Wawawai, Wa. and had no electricity!!!!! Then after I was married which was right after Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese attacked our military bases in the Hawaiian Islands. Everything machinery-wise in the United States was sent into the war effort! All the metal, etc. and so they stopped making the "little" convenient things like washing machines. Now you could not buy a washer, if your life depended upon it!!! And dryers! I don't think they were making too many of those any way!!! I never in all my married life owned a dryer!!! So out came the good old wash boards!!! I used to put the heavy clothes like the jeans, etc. into a sink, (one of those deep kind, remember? or is there any of those anymore!) Then put the washboard into the sind and lay the jeans on it an reach for a scrub brush, (a heavy-duty kind that was once used to clean your wooden floors!!) I would grab a bar of laundry soap, most of it was made from lye, and rub it onto the jeans and scrub the heck out of the jeans until they came clean. Then you wrung (or squeased the water and soaout of them, threw them into a second deep sink with clean water in it. You sloshed (my word!) them around and sqeezed them again and then refilled the sink and rinsed them over again!!! Oh! Those good old days! Then you hung them on lines strung up in the yard and let the wind, or if it was hot enough, they would dry. Wrinkled, but happily clean and you didn't do this job every day!!! Once a week, if you were lucky!!! Any other clothes could be scrubbed on the washboard! Cotton shirts, underwear, and whatever! It was fun if you like hard, hard work!!! And everything had to be ironed! Some people were crazy enough to iron their jeans, sheets pillow cases, or whatever but one has to draw the line somewhere!!!!!



Back to Dad. After things started getting better with the New Deal programs from President Roosevelt, Dad got a job up in Wallace and Kellogg, Idaho working for the big mining companies that were going full blast! He and a neighbor share the ride up there, Dad one week and this guy the next!!! In the meantime, we had to move from Grandpa's house because #9 was on the way! This suited us because we were only two blocks from the Acadamy!!! I was now in my Senior year in High School, Genevieve and Bob in High school there too and the others down to Teresa, I think, were in Grammer school there.