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Auto iron, mangle iron, clothes monster – they’re all the same

Keeping in style has always been a problem for me. The only way I can keep up with fashions is to wear cowboy clothes all the time. Those never go out of style.

My biggest problem is finding jeans that fit. There are several reasons for this, but the clothing manufacturers certainly deserve part of the blame. My waist size hasn’t changed much. It just moved down a few inches. Why can’t clothing manufacturers compensate for things like that?

I could try suspenders, but I grew up in the days when suspenders were for sissies – and bib overalls were considered “barn clothes.” Nobody would have been caught dead in a pair of suspenders when I was a kid.

All that has changed. The biggest thing going with kids today is baggy pants and suspenders. (These kids had better wear suspenders, because there’s no way to hold those pants up if they don’t.)

Nobody wore baggy pants when I was a kid. Our jeans were called overalls, and we made sure they were tight in the hips and pegged at the cuff. Anyone who could put his pants on without lying on the floor didn’t have enough taper.

Our jeans weren’t full of wrinkles, either. That’s because my mother had a mangle iron.

A few readers may remember the old mangle irons. Mother called hers the “automatic iron,” but there was nothing automatic about it. This iron had a big, round drum that rotated against a concave to press the clothes. Mother sat in front of it, feeding pants into the machine, much like one would feed a wringer-washer. The drum was operated by a foot pedal. Each time the concave was pressed against the clothes, a big cloud of steam would belch toward the ceiling.

Talk about power! Using a mangle iron for washday was like taking a road-roller to a cookie bake. There were five boys in our family, and Mother was dedicated to keeping all of our clothes clean. Washday often looked like an explosion at a Levi’s factory. The automatic iron would press any type of clothes, but Mother only used it for overalls. If you put a tan shirt through this iron, it came out looking like a brown grocery bag. Jeans rolled from the automatic iron like paper from a typewriter. These pants were brittle.

You had to bend them over a chair or slam them in a door a few times to loosen them up so you could crawl in.
Styles change, I guess. Clean, well-pressed clothes were a lot more important in those days than they are now.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. Those loose cotton pants kids are wearing these days wouldn’t have lasted two weeks at our house. Mother’s automatic iron would have eaten them alive.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.

10/14/2009