Speed Queen!

I have a personal connection with the Speed Queen washing machine pictured in this 1949 ad. When my grandfather passed away I took the job of caretaker for the home where he lived in for over sixty years. It was an late 30’s era bungalow in a run-down neighborhood not far from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and like most homes of its age, the builders had a different idea of what constituted "all the comforts of home". 

Originally there had been no indoor facilities, but before I came along my grandparents had built on a bathroom with a bath tub (no shower, just a tub). In spite of a decent retirement from Detroit Diesel Allison, the grandparents never spent the money they had socked away. I guess memories of the Great Depression kept them frugal to the end of their days. Grandpa drove a battered, third-hand truck and grandma dressed appropriate to the Eisenhower administration. They never had air conditioning, in fact the height of comfort was when my father installed a ceiling fan to stir the hot air around the tight confines of the house, and when I moved in the washing machine in residence was a Speed Queen upright identical to the one in this ad.

For three years I used the Speed Queen to do my laundry and the experience has led me to the conclusion that the modern definition of convenience is somewhat different than that of our grandparents. The safety that grandma probably considered a finger saver proved to be an eternal nuisance for me, popping every time I ran a pair of jeans through the wringer. Filling the machine with water involved carting buckets of hot water from the kitchen sink to the garage where the beast lived and, when washing was completed, draining it meant rolling it out the back door and onto the walk, unhitching the hose that connected to the tub’s drain, and releasing a torrent of laundry effluent into the lawn. It took a whole Sunday for me to complete three or four loads (I'm still trying to figure out what the advertising executives were smoking when they implied you could do seven loads in an hour). 

All I can say is I hate to think what using the Speed Queen Ironer must have been like!