Nancy Classics by Ernie Bushmiller for June 21, 2024

Love it that Aunt Fritzi is using the clothes pins which pre-date the clothes pins with springs which are popular today. We used to use those clothes pins to make clothes pin dolls – a little ink could fill in the details of a face, pipe cleaners for arms and bits of cloth for clothes. If you had a sidewalk under the clothes line, you were really living in a “Ritzy” place. We didn’t put the clothes pins in our mouths, though. We had an apron which we tied around the waist and had a big pocket in front, where we put the clothes pins. We also had a cloth bag with a hook on it, which could hang on the clothes line, filled with clothes pins and pushed along the line when you moved down the line. Aunt Fritzi might have just come home from work when she ran out to hang up some clothes. During the comic book days, Aunt Fritzi had quite a few interesting jobs. My Grandmother had a great set up for drying clothes, though. She kept her washing ’machine" on her service porch and had her clothes line strung around inside the service porch. She had large screened windows around the service porch. She could raise the windows and get a lot of fresh air on a good day, but close the windows when the weather outside was too damp to allow the clothes to dry. We had our extra clothes line in the kitchen. We had the hooks for the clothes line around the room, up close to the ceiling. When the weather was too damp to dry clothes outdoors, we dried them in the kitchen. The advantage of drying the clothes outdoors was that they always smelled good! When I was in high school, the Home Ec text book we used observed that a clothes drying machine HAD been developed, but, since the machines were very expensive AND they used way too much expensive electricity, it was “highly unlikely” that they would ever become very popular. Then the text book went into detail about the simple, efficient and inexpensive way to set up your own clothesline if you needed to do that job yourself