Today I was working on another grandbaby quilt. As I was ironing quilt pieces I thought of how much I enjoy my extra wide ironing board and lightweight steam iron. For an instant I went back to when I was a child in my semi-pioneer home in Montana. I call it that because it was a homesteader's home built about 1900 and then converted to fit my parents' growing family when we moved there in 1951. It was outfitted with conveniences like the old tin tub, the "outhouse", the oil-burning stove (later changed to coal burning stove), and a few conveniences that came later like an electric washing machine, and even later an electric dryer and eventually even a telephone by the time I was in junior high school.
When I was really young, my mom had a couple of the old-fashioned irons (the original flatirons which are not even remotely like the "flatirons" used for hair today) that have to be heated on a stove or other heat source.
(These are similar to the ones I saw as a child.)She showed us how to use them, but we had an electric iron so we didn't need to use them for real. One needed to own more than one so that there would always be a hot one. When one cooled off, it was placed back on the heat in exchange for a hot one.
Denise and I started ironing clothes at a very young age. We started with handkerchiefs, dish towels and pillow cases and later graduated to shirts and dresses. Nearly everything we wore had to be ironed because there were not many synthetic fabrics then, mostly cottons. We didn't have steam irons so we had to "sprinkle" the clothes to help get the wrinkles out. We would get all ambitious and sprinkle the whole batch at once and then begin ironing. Of course we didn't get through even a small portion of them so what did we do to keep the rest of the clothes from getting mildew until we could iron them? Easy. We just put the clothes in the freezer until next ironing day.
My mom was lucky at some point to get an Ironrite mangle iron; don't ask me where she got it. It was similar to this one (This lady is not related:)) It looks like something you might have seen at a dry cleaners. It didn't seem to me that we were rich enough to own such a device. It was quite an impressive machine, and I loved to watch mom operate it. She actually used it for the large parts of shirts and dresses but it was hard to do the areas like collars, sleeves, and yokes. Though the machine was a bit intimidating, I do remember ironing handkerchiefs and dish towels with it. I was just wondering why this amazing piece of technology of the 1940s and 1950s didn't survive to become a household necessity standing in every home of America right next to the television.
