Word: washday
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Washing Machine. In undeveloped nations, washday means a trek to the nearest stream, where clothes are beaten or scrubbed by hand. To improve on this, the International Cooperation Administration demonstrated a wooden, hand-operated washing machine simple enough to be built by semiskilled workers for $3 on a quantity basis. The washer holds the clothes in a rectangular tub while two plungers, attached to a crossbeam that is operated by hand, force water back and forth through them. ICA plans to send models to its missions around the world...
...supply U.S. housewives on washday, six U.S. companies and nine competing foreign nations manufacture spring-operated clothespins at the rate of 791 million a year. Last week, to please the six U.S. companies-and protect a market worth less than $4,000,000-at the risk of offending Sweden, Denmark, West Germany, Yugoslavia and five others, President Eisenhower doubled the tariff on imports of spring clothespins to the U.S. Concurring in a Tariff Commission finding that domestic industry was "injured" by rising imports, he raised the tariff from 10? per gross to 20? per gross, to give "appropriate relief...
...Fixit. "This here runaround" is a phrase instantly recognizable to hundreds of thousands of frustrated U.S. householders-and so is the "they." "They," in the moment of supreme exasperation that coincides with the collapse of an electric dryer on washday, is the apparently easy going, unhurried individual who is striving manfully to maintain the plumbing in the nation's 28 million homes, the wrench-wielding mechanic who administers to the health of the nation's 50 million autos, its 15 million power lawnmowers, its 375 million electric appliances. "They" is the U.S. Repairman in all his disguises...
...Washday Helper. Norge Sales Corp. will soon market an electric timer on two of its top-priced automatic washers that allows housewives to tootle off for the day without worrying about wet wash sitting in the machine for hours. Norge's "Round-the-Clock Timer" can be preset to start the machine anytime up to ten hours after the departing housewife puts in laundry and soap...
...Washday" begins when the men of CSCN/CHSA* and lesser U.S. commands leave for work either in their own cars (2,487) or on any of the five Navy-run bus lines. Wives hustle the children off (on any of eight Navy-run school bus lines) to the world's largest Navy-operated dependents' school (1,000 pupils), then go around to shop in a cut-rate hangar-sized commissary (stocking electrical appliances, rock-'n'-roll records and quick-frozen Little Bo Pizzas shipped from the U.S.), or in any of the seven handy branch stores (total...