GOING, GOING, GONE:

                   CLOTHESLINES

(Source of image: Florida State Archives)

Aprons for purchase hung from these clotheslines in October 1957.  The lines were set up during a well-attended Jacksonville Garden Club show, which sold such items as jarred preserves, canopied baby beds, straw hats bedecked with flowers, and crocheted dolls, both black and white.  The affair under the Spanish moss also offered a tiny tot merry-go-round, a meal on paper plates, and beverages in china cups.  Mrs. Virginia B. Fudger served as the group's director during this time.  The Garden Club has long been located at 1005 Riverside Avenue, near the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens.  Both the gallery and the garden club were launched many years ago by Ninah Cummer, wife of Jax lumber baron Arthur Cummer. 

CLOTHESLINE ETIQUETTE -- Jacksonville was hung up in clotheslines until home dryers became widespread during the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies.  Families pinned their laundry on lines to air dry if they didn't own a dryer or visit a laundromat.  Nevertheless, the recent census had shown that, even among impoverished Americans, the ownership of dryers is now high.

The family of the website manager of JacksonvilleStory.com lived in Ocala, Florida, during the Fifties & Sixties.  Clotheslines crisscrossed the neighborhood, according to his older brother, a social studies teacher near Palatka.  He and his chums would dart through each other's yards playing tag, hide-&-seek, cops-and-robbers, and cowboys-and-Indians.  Proper play etiquette at night, however, required something important:  Kids with clotheslines in their yards were to prop the wires or ropes out of the way.  The children set tall boards in the middle of sagging lines, pushing them above head level.  Nevertheless, this didn't stop an unsuspecting player from occasionally getting clotheslined.

The website manager's family kept a close eye on the weather.  At the first rumble of thunder, his mother would dash to take down diapers pinned to a line running from the backdoor to the back fence.  The website manager remembers the makeshift clotheslines that used to stretch down the hallway during rain showers.

  THANK YOU...  

       FOR VISITING THE JACKSONVILLE STORY,

        YOUR TIME MACHINE TO THE PAST