230707 Clothes Pins

I suspect clothes pins are not in regular use these days.

Most people have a clothes dryer or go to a laundromat and use their dryer. Way back in the days of old in my house, mom had an old Maytag wringer washing machine in our basement. It was a round tub that washed our clothes and it had an electric wringer mounted across the top. Mom washed a tub of laundry and when that tub was done, it was time for me to run the clothes through the wringer and then hang them in our basement using clothes pins on cotton clothes lines suspended from the ceiling. One day I was wondering what it felt like to go through the wringer, so I put my finger into the wringer. I was not a bright child! That wringer smashed my finger and it turned deep purple for more than a week. I only did that one time.

In Joyce’s family, they had the same Maytag, but they had clothes lines in the backyard. They worked fine in summer, but not so good in the winter. Her mother, being German, had a strict routine for hanging clothes. The outside of the clothes lines were for street clothes while the inner lines were for underwear because no one should be able to see another’s underclothes.

When I was in navy boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois, it was nice and warm until November. We did not have clothes pins, we used clothes stops. I have no idea why they were called that. They were nine inch long cotton twine that was used to tie clothes to a clothes line. The navy was strict on how the clothes were tied and grouped. T shirts on one line, skivvies on another and dungarees on yet another line and everything spaced 2 inches apart. The cold of November came early that year and our clothes were hanging outside, frozen solid. I pushed on a t-shirt at one end of the line and the t-shirts at the other end raised. They were that stiff. That was when we were allowed to use the drying room for our clothes. A drying room was in each barracks and they were heated to about 100 degrees. The drying rooms also had another unauthorized purpose, settling disputes between sailors, (fist fights).

Somehow Joyce managed to hold on to about 18 clothes pins when we moved here. We have a clothes dryer, but Joyce used the clothes pins to reseal a bag after it was opened. This morning I had some shredded wheat for breakfast and the bag is resealed with, you guessed it, clothes pins. The old is new once again.