That Day at the Laundromat

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David Cohen illustration

When I was growing up, we never had a clothes dryer. My earliest recollection of a washing machine was a wringer model that stood in our small kitchen. Later, a Sears Kenmore top-load washer was installed in the dining room that adjoined our kitchen.

Though we didn’t own a dryer, my father had put a sturdy clothesline in our upper backyard, near the well house. My mother would carry an aluminum dishpan full of wet clothes up to the clothesline, and I helped her pin the washing to the lines. We filled them with an assortment of pants, shirts, dresses, socks, pajamas, underwear, and my father’s white handkerchiefs. On a breezy day, the washing danced like a chorus line of clothes.

On sunny days, the clothes dried quickly. But if the sky darkened and we heard the rumbling of thunder, we rushed to the backyard to snatch our clothes off the lines, even if they were damp.

On frigid winter days, the clothes would freeze, and we had to pry the stiff garments from the lines. If snow had fallen and the yard was icy, the dishpan sometimes escaped from us, sliding down the hill and landing at the house. When this happened, I sat on my haunches and slid down the hill on my rubber boot soles to retrieve the pan.

My mother also had a folding clothes drying rack that she used on rainy summer days. She hung the clothes on this wooden rack in one of our warm upstairs bedrooms. For years, our upstairs bedrooms remained unfinished and had exposed wall and ceiling rafters where wasps would make nests. So before she folded these clothes to take downstairs, she shook them to free any hidden wasps.

A solution to our rainy and snowy day clothes drying problems came with a new laundromat in town, located on East Court Street and a short distance from Marion’s Clinchfield community, where my mother grew up in the mill village. The Sav-A-Day Laundry featured coin-operated washers and dryers, convenient clothes folding tables, and ample chairs for patrons to sit in while they waited for their clothes to wash and dry. A Tastee-Freez was located just up the sidewalk, in case we wanted a snack.

My mother didn’t drive, so my father dropped us off at the laundromat and picked us up later.

One day in 1970, when I was 14, I sat in the laundromat’s waiting area, reading a book, while my mother attended to our clothes at a washing machine.

As I sat there, an elderly man came and sat in the chair next to mine. He wore an old black suit jacket, baggy pants, and a tattered fedora. Tall and lanky, he reminded me of Jed Clampett.

He sat quiet for a while. Then he pulled a mouth harp from his jacket pocket and placed it between his lips. With his forefinger he began plucking the instrument’s metal reed, and as he twanged, I recognized the tune “Old Dan Tucker.” And before I knew it, he had hopped up and started flatfoot dancing, stomping his worn-out boots in time to the music. When he finished, I said, “That was good!”

“Well,” he said and returned the mouth harp to his jacket pocket, “I reckon I better be a-goin’.” And he headed out the laundromat door.

When my mother joined me, sitting in the chair where the man had sat, I told her about him.

“I seen him dancing,” she said.

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t,” she said. Then she added, “He sure could play the juice harp.”

My mother and I continued going to Sav-A-Day Laundry for many years, even into my adulthood when I was married, had my own basket of clothes, and drove us to the laundromat in my car. Finally in the mid-1980s when my mother and I both had washers and dryers at home, we stopped going to the laundromat. But through the years while we went there, I never saw the elderly man again. And I never understood why he came into the laundromat that day to play his mouth harp and dance for me.