Coin-operated Memories

When I was four years old, my family moved from a tiny house in Centenary, Indiana, with no indoor plumbing to a less tiny house with that modern convenience. The water that came out of our faucets and flushed our toilet in Summit Grove came from a well under the back porch.

That meant no fluoride in our water like the nearby towns, and we’d all have plenty of cavities to show for it! Dad didn't worry about our dental health, though. He had bigger worries, like the well running dry.

When we first moved into the house, Mom washed our clothes using the old washing machine we moved with us from our old house. Because we had to fill it using the outside pump spigot, it sat on the back porch in Centenary. There really wasn’t a place for it inside the new house, so it made sense to keep it on the porch there, too.  

To wash our clothes, Mom filled the machine’s tub with water from the outside hose and, after the cycle, drained the tub and ran the garments through the hand-crank wringer before hanging them on the clothesline to dry. This worked out okay until we added a few kids to the family, and then the old machine quit working.

Dad decided that with so many of us, we would surely use up all the well water washing all that laundry at home. To conserve water, we started going to the laundromat every weekend.

To lighten the load, Dad did his part by going shirtless most of the time. A practice he never gave up, even as his belly grew, his man-boobs sagged, and his chest hair grayed.

Of course, Dad didn’t want to spend the money on a washing machine either. He had an RV to save for. And, like most things, Mom covered the cost of the laundromat.

She earned that extra money by working overtime, usually on Saturdays, leaving Sundays for laundry. Newly married, she was quoted in her senior yearbook as saying her goal was to be a full-time housewife. And here she was a little over a decade later, a full-time housewife with a full-time job… living the dream!

On Sunday mornings, everyone would load up our dirty clothes, pile into the car, and Mom would drive to the laundromat in Clinton. Everyone but Dad, who stayed home shirtless. Doing his part!

We would pull up in front of the laundromat, and the parade of Carty kids carrying laundry baskets would begin. Each week, we had so many loads that we took up an entire row of machines.

At Mom’s direction, we would load those machines, sorting by color and/or function. All the underclothes in one machine. Dark and light clothes were separated. All towels together, no matter the color, and we made sure to add the free towel that came in the box of detergent. 

I would venture to say almost every towel we had in our home came free inside a box of Breeze laundry detergent. As you might imagine, to fit inside a soap box, they were not luxurious.

Then one of us got the job of putting the quarters into the slots, while someone else followed, pushing the levers that dropped the coins and started the machines. No one had a claim to any of these assigned jobs. We took turns and worked as a team. The laundromat trips included many life lessons.

Once the clothes were washing, we were free to hang out. We could walk around the block, play jacks, or flip through old magazines left behind by others who had cautiously torn off the mailing labels to protect their identities. The only magazines we had at home were Field & Stream, so these well-worn, probably germ-covered issues were a treat.

If we had any extra dimes, we could ride on Sandy, the mechanical horse. Sandy was a thing of beauty. A shiny, painted cast aluminum brown pony with a white mane and tail. She had a saddle complete with a saddle horn and reins to hold on to, making it easier to have more than one rider at a time. 

To get each dime’s worth, we’d pile on as many of us as possible. On more than one occasion, the matronly laundromat attendant would scold us and shake her head, side-eyeing Mom, as if to say, “Control your damn kids!”

Mom tried her best to ignore her, flipping through a non-Field & Stream magazine.

The washing machine did its job in about 30 minutes. The final spin cycle made the washer shake, which was fun to lean against and talk with a vibrating voice as we waited for the click indicating the cycle was complete. I loved opening the lid to watch the clothes stuck to the side of the tub spinning to a slow stop.

As each machine stopped turning, we used one of the laundromat’s wheeled metal carts to transport the wet clothes to the dryers. The dryers were bigger and could hold more than one washer load. Because we were “frequent flyers,” we knew which dryers were hottest and chose by that metric, not just by location. Hotter dryers did the job faster, getting us out sooner without needing extra quarters.

Once the clothes were dry, we folded and sorted the clothes by owner. A basket for the boys’ room, one for the girls’, one for our parents. When he was the county assessor, Mom ironed Dad’s office clothes, so those were loaded in a separate basket. She could do the ironing later at home, along with all her other full-time housewife duties.

I remember Mom standing at the ironing board, dipping her fingertips into a cup of water and flicking it onto the clothes before ironing them. She would give the iron a little wiggle as it passed over the clothes to make sure no creases formed. I’m sure she learned this technique from her mother, and on the rare occasion that I do any ironing, I do the same iron wiggle. But I have a steam iron, so no water flicking for me.

If we helped enough at the laundromat and behaved ourselves, which, except for the occasional Sandy pile-on, we usually did, Mom would reward us with a quick stop at a gas station to buy penny candy. We were each given a few coins and got to run in on our own to pick our candy. Mom would wait in the car and enjoy five minutes of peace and quiet.

On one of these occasions, we all got back into the car, and Mom noticed our youngest brother wasn’t with us. “Where’s Jeff?” she asked. 

“He wahn't in dere.,” Alan mumbled with his mouth jammed full of his confections.

Mom rushed inside and frantically asked the man behind the counter if her youngest boy was still in there.

“He wasn’t in here,” he said more clearly. 

“Oh, shit!” Mom hurried back out to the car, and we drove quickly back to the laundromat.

In Mom’s defense, there were a lot of us, and Jeff was always small for his age... all except his disproportionately large ears, which he eventually grew into. Bless his heart.*

*As mentioned in a previous story, if you make fun of someone, you need to follow it with “Bless their heart,” and that makes it not so mean.

 When we got back to the laundromat, we all ran in. There sat 4-year-old Jeff, being comforted by the matronly laundromat attendant, who stared daggers at Mom.

“I told you they’d be back,” she said into Jeff’s big-for-his-age ear, patting him on his tiny back.

Being so young, it’s doubtful Jeff would remember this traumatic childhood event. Fortunately, we older siblings have been there throughout his life to remind him. Every chance we get... like now.

And we only embellish the story a little bit.

“We ran back in, and there you were, sitting on Sandy, holding onto her reins, rocking back and forth and crying like a baby.”