After seeing a heading in one of my papers the other day, “Spring cleaning,” it brought this 83-year-old mind of mine back to my memory of spring cleaning in our house way back in the 1930s.

 

First job was taking down the old coal stove in our front living room.

 

This was a big boy that sat on a heavy chrome base.

 

This stove and a smaller one were all we had to heat those 10-foot ceilings.

 

It took two men to lift it on to a wheeled dolly to haul it out to the covered back porch for its summer home.

 

Back in those days we had a large, nine-foot by 12-foot carpet in our living room.

 

This was held down by carpet tacks all around the outside borders.

 

We had a small tool called a carpet tack puller (I still have this little tool).

 

It was my job to pull up all these many carpet tacks.

 

After the stove was out of the room, the stove pipe was taken from the hole in the wall that it fit into.

 

Next, we used a long-handled wooden spoon to scoop out the soot from the chimney.

 

Next, we took the big rug out in the back yard and hung it on the clothesline.

 

We had a carpet beater, a wired outfit with a handle and used to beat the dust out of the rug.

 

It was then brought back and put down on the floor.

 

After being tacked down, we washed it with some kind of soap and I remember some ammonia was added to the pail of water.

 

Next job was taking down the lace curtains and washing them, and they were put on an outfit called a curtain stretcher.

 

This was an outfit that had little needle-sharp points sticking up and stretched your curtains on these points.

 

After they had dried you hung them back up to the windows. Then you put a steel rod through the seam at the bottom of the curtains and hung a small steel weight on each end of the rod to make them hang nice and straight.

 

The windows had been washed inside and out before the curtain hanging.

 

Back in the ’30s we had those old green shades that hung halfway down from the top of the window and could be pulled down for privacy.

 

Another thing that was done was to clean the wallpapers of the dirt from the old coal stove.

 

This was done with a kind of Play-Dough stuff that came in a can, and pink color at first, but soon turned black from the dirt taken from the wallpaper.

 

Another thing of my memory of spring cleaning was taking the bed mattresses out in the back yard and laying them between four of our big, old wooden dining room chairs to let the mattresses get aired out.

 

Another thing we did in the spring was put stove blacking on our old stove on the back covered porch for its summer home.

 

The big door of our old stove had windows of isinglass and you could see the flames of the fire in the stove. These didn’t have to be replaced every year.

 

So, this is what spring cleaning meant in my early 1930s years.