A Clothesline is a Deluxe Tanning Bed for the Laundry

By Al Batt

In a strange and distant land, in the long-ago year of 1962, a man asked Bob Dylan how he should dry his laundry.

Dylan answered famously, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

Dylan turned that answer into famous song that posed a series of rhetorical questions about peace, war, freedom and laundry.

There you have it. Dylan’s expertise in laundry ranks right up there with that given on a TV commercial in 1972, in which a customer asked a laundromat owner, Mr. Lee, why his shirts were so clean. Mr. Lee tapped his head and replied mysteriously, “Ancient Chinese secret.” His wife yelled from the back that they needed more Calgon, exposing the “secret” as a commercial water softener. The customer said smugly, “Ancient Chinese secret, huh?”

My grandmother used the latest technology – a wringer washer, and solar and wind power to dry the laundry on a clothesline. My mother, my mother-in-law and my wife joined the clothesline team. It’s an environmentally friendly way to harness the power of the sun and wind. A clothesline is a tanning bed for clothes and gives a person the chance to get outdoors for a reason other than using a speakerphone in public. A wash out on a clothesline is better than a washout in the backyard.

A clothesline gave football announcers a reason to say, a “clothesline tackle,” which is an illegal maneuver where a defender extends an arm horizontally at an opponent’s neck or head. Tall boys running away from Halloween night shenanigans occasionally experienced clotheslines that would “clothesline” them.

Air drying is a wonderful thing because being sun-drenched and tickled by a gentle breeze prolongs the life of clothing and saves on energy bills. But most importantly, it keeps clothespins employed. Oh, sure, the occasional towel turns into sandpaper, but that’s the towel’s decision.

Mom had rules. You hang shirts upside down from the side seams. You hang the unmentionables on the inside lines, and sheets and towels on the outside lines, so that the unmentionables were not readily visible. Keep away from a tree that is a popular perch for regular birds. And do not put up a clothesline across a cross-country running course.

Remember, when you air on line, everyone can see it. When you err online, you become fake news.

In Walt Disney’s 1937 animated masterpiece, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” during the iconic “Whistle While You Work” sequence, Snow White cleaned the Dwarfs’ messy cottage with the help of her animal friends. The scene features a highly coordinated and whimsical routine where birds hang wet laundry on a clothesline. An exultant moment.

Sergio Leone, an Italian filmmaker credited as the pioneer of the spaghetti western, used laundry frantically snapping in the wind to underscore the vulnerability and isolation of his characters. He had many popular movies, including “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “A Fistful of Dollars,” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

Clothesline pulley systems were innovative outdoor loops of rope strung between tenement windows of opposing buildings across courtyards and alleys, allowing the nimble hands of residents to hang and retrieve laundry from a window. I perused photos of these at work as laundry swayed in the breeze in New York City immigrant neighborhoods in the 1890s-1940s. Neighbors used the intersecting lines to pass small items and notes between apartments.

When a couple of towels had been reduced to rags, my mother happily went into a store to buy new ones. My father stayed in the car and enjoyed a sweet parking spot far from the madding crowd.

A clothes dryer does offer certain benefits. Drying is never called off because of rain. The clothes removed from a dryer seldom have fresh bird poop on them. But be forewarned: a clothes dryer and ice cream are the two major factors in shrinking our clothing.

Never dry laundry in a microwave oven.

Sheets hung on a clothesline carry a fresh, clean smell. You can smell the sunshine. Sheets dried in a microwave smell like burnt popcorn.

I learned a lesson from those clotheslines.

Be sure to duck when running away from the scene of Halloween night shenanigans.