Up until this point I have been thinking of this project as a lark, not imagining that anyone except myself would care about my freshman year adventures at Gettysburg College. I figured that after a few hundred words I would tire of the whole exercise and abandon the effort. But if I am motivated enough to write about my laundry that is a pretty good indication that I am in this for the long haul.
I was only a freshman once and can only speak about the subject of laundry with respect to Gettysburg College but I have to think that freshmen away from home for the first time all experience this same challenge. At Gettysburg we had it easier than some because the college furnished linens, two bed sheets and a pillow case. When checking in for room assignments and keys we were given directions to the linen issuing location which was a few hundred yards away from my dorm. An outside laundry service provided weekly linen exchange, not compulsory - one guy kept his original sheets for two semesters - but most of us faithfully exchanged ours each week - after all we had paid for this service. Each clean set was wrapped in brown paper, it sounds silly but that made it seem like they were new.
Although this prepaid service eliminated the need to wash our own sheets we still faced the task of washing our clothes. Most 18 year-old boys had little experience with this concept. Fortunately most 18 year-old boys wore a very limited wardrobe so it took a while to fill a laundry bag with dirty clothes. I'm guessing that I was not faced with this challenge for a couple of weeks at which point I became aware that something needed to be done about my increasingly heavy laundry bag. Which in my case had the words Camp Mowana on the side and an Indian arrowhead logo, a legacy of my Lutheran summer camp days.
Several other of the guys on my dorm floor were also facing this situation and we realized at about the same time that the dorm did not have a laundry room. But there was enough rudimentary knowledge between us to know that just off campus at 158 E. Water St. was "Schwartz's Washette", a self-service coin operated laundry. Freshmen were not allowed cars but Schwartz's was within walking distance. It was a six block walk, not easy with a heavy laundry bag but they sold detergent in those little boxes so it was only a bag of clothes and a book or two because you might as well study while waiting on the washer and dryer to finish. A group of us typically walked over there together.
This was my first experience with a coin operated laundry and probably my first hands-on experience with some elements of the clothes washing process. I had occasionally operated a dryer and at my grandmother's I had operated a wringer until she got her first automatic washer.
At some point that fall I became aware that Apple Hall, the upperclassmen's dorm, had a laundry room in the basement of their newly opened annex. This was only two buildings away and except for there being an occasional wait for a machine it was a better option. That laundry room had a television and I have since associated the show "Here Come The Brides" with Apple Hall. I must have fallen into a routine of doing laundry on a certain night of the week.
I also learned a trick about coin op dryers that year. These took a dime for each ten minutes but you could break off the thinner portion of the pull tab from a Coke can and place it at one end of a piece of masking tape. Then you could insert that end in the coin slot and turn the metal knob. Each turn gave you ten minutes of drying time and you could then pull the tape back out of the slot. Seemingly leaving no trace behind.