Daytime

(entry for 11/6/24)

I have mentioned in previous Memory Blog Posts that we moved from Montrose to Grand Junction in 1953, so that I could continue my Adventist education.

One side effect of the move was that we could suddenly watch TV. There was a TV station in Grand Junction, which had not been true of Montrose.

My dad discovered the Lawrence Welk Show immediately, and we had to watch it with him every Saturday night. (Fortunately it was on late enough so that even in the height of summer when the sun didn’t go down until 7:30 or so— there was no such thing as Daylight Savings Time yet— we didn’t have to violate the Sabbath to watch it.)

That is the only show I remember from our first year in GJ. For one thing, the Health Food Store that my dad owned was too busy, and consumed too much of our time, for us to watch anything on weekdays, even after hours, as cleaning up after a day at the store and getting ready for the next day usually took all of us a couple of hours to accomplish. But we were closed on both Saturday and Sunday, so Saturday night was free for watching.

But after a year and a half of Health Food marketing, my dad got bored (the story of his life as to houses, cars, and— yes— jobs), so he sold the store and our house on Orchard Mesa, and we moved to ‘downtown,’ just a few blocks from the biggest park in the city, and he took a job with a mining company looking for uranium in the surrounding area, as their bookkeeper. He didn’t watch any TV in the daytime. He needed the money he got from working, so he worked.

On weekdays, morning TV was talk shows and game shows and musical performances (pop only, nothing classical). My mom declared that all of these were ‘silly,’ a word with which she put down anything she didn’t like.  And late afternoon was more of the same.

But!

To bring in a bit of extra income (another story of our lives) my mom had begun to operate a self-service laundry behind the house, part of our property, but with its entrance off the alley behind our house, rather than from the street. In fact, the building had started out as a very long one-car garage, capable of holding a limousine, but had been converted, first, into an apartment, and then into the Laundromat.

Now, when you read the words ‘self-service laundromat,’ the image that most likely springs into your mind is that of a line of coin-operated automatic washers and dryers, and a bunch of likewise-coin-operated soap vending machines.

Wrong!

We did have one automatic washing machine, but it wasn’t very reliable, and, worse, was a front loader, and new-fangled and unfamiliar and odd-looking to our customers, who, like us, were rather dyed in our old ways, to coin a phrase. (A lot of customers did use that machine for dyeing, rather than washing.)

What we did have plenty of was wringer washing machines and rinse tubs.  Six washing machines and eighteen rinse tubs, three for each washer.

If you’re too young to remember what wringer washers were, here’s a picture. (And, yes, all six of ours were Maytags, which was considered far superior to any other brand.)

The machines were all-electric, wringer and agitator both.  The old crank-operated wringers were old-fashioned.  We wouldn't have tolerated them, and neither would our customers.

You ran the agitator for a few minutes to get the dirt out. Then you used the wringer to squeeze the soapy water out, and the still-wet and soapy shirt or dress or whatever fell from the wringer into the first rinse tub.

And rinse tubs were just, well, square tapered galvanized steel tubs of about twenty or twenty-five gallon capacity, full of cool tap water, and with a drain hole in the bottom above a floor drain, so you could empty your rinse-water out and run in new, from a handy hose. Each washing machine had three rinse tubs, forming a four-compartment square on the floor. The washing machine itself occupied the southeast corner of the square, and the first rinse water tub was in the northeast corner. The wringer was on a swivel, at the middle of the square, so that it could be used as the go-between for each step in the process. Washing machine, first rinse, second rinse, third rinse. If you wanted to add ‘bluing’ to make your whites look whiter, you added that to the third rinse, which was in the southwest corner of the square, the second rinse having occupied the northwest corner.

Here's the kind of rinse tub I mean, only this one has a wringer mounted on it.  Ours did not have built-in wringers, as the washing machine's wringer swiveled to reach all three of its rinse tubs.

It was all very efficient, in a rather inefficient sort of way!

You did not drain the washing machine proper. That was considered wasteful. You simply used the same soapy water that was already there, over and over again, adding more soap as needed. There were two kinds: Ivory Flakes, which was actual soap, and Tide, which was a new-fangled detergent. You didn’t dare mix them. Some machines had one, and some the other. The customers picked which kind they wanted and chose an appropriate machine that contained that. There was also a hot-water hose at each washing machine, in case you needed to warm the water up. Which was often. (The washing machines did get drained at the end of the day, and refilled the next morning.)

My mom was partial to soap, but tolerated customers who wanted Tide, which we sold in either a large box or in small ones. We made more money on the small ones, so we pushed those.

And lest you become too complacent about the agitator, it was only in the washing machine, and could not be used in the rinse tubs. Those were manual labor only. You had large spoon-shaped sticks with which you bounced the clothing up and down in the rinse water till the soap came out. Or most of it, one hoped. (You had to pay extra if the rinse process had to start all over again because the third rinse still looked soapy.)

There were also three commercial size natural gas clothes dryers, not coin operated.  The customer simply paid my mom, in cash.

Everything was cash and carry. Credit cards hadn’t been invented yet. (Except in Department Stores, which we weren’t.)

My mom had an ‘office’ in a separate room of the former garage, between the laundry part and the house. She had a cash box from which she made change, and into which she deposited the money from the sales of soap and the use of the machines.

In addition to the cash box, the small office had, also, a small black and white TV set. (Color TV had not been invented yet.)

Which brings us, finally, to what this blog post has supposedly been about all along: Daytime TV. Or, as we called it, simply, ‘Daytime.’ In other words, ‘Soaps.’ (Very appropriate in a laundry, don’t you think?)

There were three shows: ‘Love of Life,’ ‘The Guiding Light,’ and ‘The Edge of Night.’ There were ads between the shows, but not during.  Our local TV station was affiliated with the CBS network, and all three shows were produced by CBS.

The first two lasted fourteen minutes each. The third one, twenty-eight minutes. One hour total, including ads, and then the TV was turned off for the rest of the day. From 1pm to 2pm, we had Soaps. Before that and after that, we had soap. And detergent.  Sometimes, there was overlap between the two activities, if customers were there at the ‘wrong time.’ (The closed sign went up at 12:55 and came down at 2:02.) But the TV took priority for that hour. The cash box stayed locked on its stool in the corner.

[Note: Wikipedia states that ‘Edge of Night’ did not start running for a half hour until 1956. This cannot be correct. By 1956 I was well into my boarding school residence at Laurelwood Academy in Oregon, and the laundry business was long gone. Along with that TV. And I know that ‘Edge of Night’ was twice the length of each of the others, which I found boring and lacking in any real emotion. But I loved Edge of Night, which was full of suspense, and mild double-entendre, and even some seemingly-actual emotion. Though by 1956 I had ‘outgrown’ it.]

During that hour, we didn’t eat. We didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t move. We almost didn’t breathe.

Would the church have approved if they had known? Undoubtedly not. But that didn’t matter. ‘Soaps’ were more important than anything else, on weekdays from 1 to 2. More important than food. More important than money. Even more important than cleanliness.

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For an index of other entries in Len's Memory Blog, click HERE.

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