More Words, Deeper Hole

I can remember the washing machine my grandmother used, and the first one my mother had, for that matter. They compare to our current washing machine as an icebox does to a refrigerator - assuming you have to load the ice yourself.

Oh yes, she had an icebox, too. And her dryer was a line, of couse. I do laundry in at most a quarter the time it took her.


For a true horror story, look at the second volume of Caro's LBJ biography, "means of ascent", go to the chapter on life in the hill country in the 1930s, and in particular the section on wash day. No surprise that hill country women looked old at forty. And this was in a developed country, in my parents' lifetimes.

William Hyde