Background:
On his CBS Radio show on Friday morning, March 30, 1962, Arthur
Godfrey read an article from the Little Rock Variety. It
began, "Years ago when my mother was a bride, my Kentucky
grandmother gave her her 'receet' for washing clothes. This
treasured bit of writing now hangs above my gleaming automatic washer."
My mother was
listening, and the recipe for laundry day reminded her of her own
grandmother from her childhood in the hills of southeastern
Ohio. She wrote to CBS in New York, and they sent her
a copy. Then she asked her brother Ralph, a vice president of
the Whitman Publishing Company, to have the document typeset and
framed. When we moved into our new house the next January, this
reminder of life before appliances was hung on the wall of the
laundry room. It stayed there for 36 years.
In 2017, I
encountered this "recipe" on the Internet under the title
"Laundry Advice to a 1912 Bride from her Grandmother." |