Monday Memories: the college laundry

Last week I noticed an article in a Toledo paper that reported some Ohio colleges were offering amenities for students as an enticement to stay in the dorms--one being free laundry facilities. So that put me to thinking. How did I do laundry when I was in college? For the life of me, I can't remember how I did my laundry at McKinley Hall at the University of Illinois, but I do have a snippet of memory left from Oakwood Hall at Manchester College in Indiana.

The current Oakwood Hall on campus is a nice modern building, but the old Oakwood that was there in the 1950s was probably about 50 years old and a little down at the heels. It's possible that it was built in stages, so the dorm rooms may have been older than the lounges and porch. Both of my sisters had also lived in Oakwood when they attended Manchester. I think part of the basement was a dining hall for the whole college which everyone entered from the front outside entrance and part of it was laundry facilities with a door in the back.

My roommate used to do her 2 brothers' laundry, and if you had a boyfriend on campus (mine was at the University of Illinois), you did his laundry. Although I can't imagine why, there was some social cachet (and cash) in doing a guy's laundry ["Would you like to go steady and do my laundry?"]. Or maybe the men's dorm didn't have washers and dryers. I think if a guy didn't have a girlfriend with access to the machines in Oakwood, he sent his laundry home to mama.

Although I can't remember what the machines looked like or the route to get there from my dorm room, I remember the laundry room also had ironing boards, and tables set up for sewing and studying. One night Sylvia (friend from high school who also lived in Oakwood) and I were out after curfew. In those days, women had curfews but men did not--the reasoning being that if the girls were safely inside, the boys would be home studying. We stayed out deliberately, but were only walking the streets of North Manchester talking. When we got back to Oakwood Hall, we tapped on the basement window and someone doing her laundry, opened the door and let us in. We didn't even have to crawl in a window, which is what we thought we'd have to do. Sigh. We were so bad at being bad.

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