Laundry and raisins

I sure do remember Basic Training! I was at Great Lakes Naval Training Station from November 1966 to February 1967. Don’t ever let anyone say the winters outside Chicago aren’t bad. I remember how the company had to wash our linens and clothing. One-third of the company would flood the shower area and be stomping on the linens with about a case of detergent. Another third would be rinsing out the soap and tying small pieces of rope on the sheet corners. The last third would have the job of hanging them “outside” on clotheslines all spaced three fingers’ width between each article. Now the temperature was about 10 degrees, with wind chills near 40 below zero. After the linens were outside for one or two days, the garments and sheets had to be brought back inside to a hot drying room. You could carry at least a dozen sheets back in, and they were as stiff as a sheet of plywood. I saw one recruit accidentally bang the linens into the door jamb, and a sheet broke in half! We had no washing machines or dryers 50 years ago.
And the mess hall? This sure wasn’t mom’s meals anymore. Lunch and supper were mashed potatoes with raisins in the spuds, pot roast with more raisins in the gravy, and for breakfast raisin bread toast and oatmeal – with raisins, of course. Or raisin bran cereal. I was so sick of looking at raisins, I still won’t eat them.

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