Or maybe it was our third apartment. It was on Third Street, in Champaign, Illinois. I think it was called Harvard Apartments. I was living in a rented room at Maude Peter’s home in Urbana so I could do my student teaching at Urbana High School (in Spanish), and Bob was finishing a class in Indianapolis living with the Moir family in the Spring of 1961. We’d been married less than a year and were already “separated” by circumstances. So we probably moved in shortly before I graduated—I have photos taken at the apartment of me in my cap and gown. Anyway, there was a wringer washer in the basement (we lived on the third floor) for the tenants. As I recall, it was 25 cents a load; for that you got wash and wring, and if you were really quick, you could get er done. Fortunately, I’d helped with the wringer washer my mom had before 1953, so I knew how to use one. After our son Stanley was born, it was really important, because trying to boil diapers on the kitchen stove and wring them out, and dry them on a rack, was a lot more work.
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I do remember how wringer washer and put rubber diapers through that wringer diapers and explodes and I ruined a couple of shirts
Did you ever get anything caught in a wringer?or ruined a couple of shirts?
Tell me the stories of you have,
the clothes you have washed with wringer washer
I lived in The Harvard in the mid-90s! I was right out of Undergrad and in my first few years of teaching high school. Barr Real Estate had just taken over the building and they allowed me to have a cat.
Someone had put in one washer/drier in the scary basement by then, but there probably weren't a lot of other changes. No showers in the bathroom, just the lovely old cast iron tub. And the stove was vintage mid-century. It was my first gas stove and didn't have any igniter; you just lit a match and hoped for the best.
I miss that building so much! It was damaged in the early 2000s when someone built a giant apartment building at the corner of 3rd and Daniel and had to be torn down.
Although we've been in town a few times since 1967, I didn't know it had been torn down. Thanks for the update.
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