To the best of my recollection Arlene’s Beauty Shop hit the ground running.
Her shop was always busy practically from day one.
This meant that there were a lot of white hand towels to be washed and dried on a daily basis.
My sister was about four years old and obviously much too young to lend a hand, and at nine years of age I’m afraid I wasn’t much help either with that kind of chore. If I wasn’t at school, I think I would be able to toss a load of wash into the washer and perhaps retrieve them from the dryer, but as to folding them, that was something seemingly only my mother could do the right way.
So the goal was to automate as much as possible.
I think that’s why my parents bought a combo washer-dryer.
In those days we used an appliance dealer in Robesonia, probably recommended by my uncle Allen, and the combo washer-dryer certainly must have seemed liked good idea. It eliminated one step of transferring the load from the washer to the dryer.
It seemed like a good idea in theory, but in practice, my mother quickly discovered that with the volume of wash she had to do on a daily basis, and remember she was still doing the wash for a family of four as well, the combo washer dryer just wasn’t built to handle the strain.
It was frequently breaking down, which meant a call to the Robesonia appliance dealer, and delays in doing the wash.
I don’t know how long we kept the combo, it might not have even been a full year, but my mother decided it just wasn’t designed to handle the volume of wash that she needed to do.
So it was soon traded in for a separate washer and dryer.
Perhaps in an effort not to put too much of a strain on that dryer, I remember that when my mother did our own laundry, she tended to hang it out to dry, because I was usually the one who had to go out and bring it in once it was dry, that being one of the tasks I was capable of performing.
By the way, in those days, the late 1950s through the early 1960s, I recall that we went through several television sets.
Those were still the days of vacuum tubes, and our television tended to stay on from morning till night whether anyone was watching it or not, so the tubes burned out frequently, requiring additional calls to the Robesonia appliance dealer, and perhaps a new TV every two years or so.
We lived in that house from November 1957 to the summer of 1964 and we bought at least two and possibly three new TVs during that period. So whenever anyone says they don’t build things like they used to, they probably aren’t talking about TVs.
I’m pretty sure this is my mother’s lifelong friend Joann Shay Weiant having her hair done by my mother. Joann and her children lived across the street from us in those days. I have no idea who was snapping these old black and white pics.
