Privations in San Diego and "Monday best"
My mom had a 1958 GE Filter Flo pair, so I don't remember anything more ancient than that. The house, having been built in the 1930s, had no drain pipe in the wall, so an adjacent laundry sink took care of the drainage function (no suds saver).
We did laundry on an "as you go" basis, a load or two every day or two, and never let it accumulate. We also often had to do laundry on weekends, but not for reasons of church or cooking: I was a member of the San Diego School Safety Patrol and was decked out all in white. Not to mention the red cardigan sweater, snappy military cap, badge, and cap insignia. Both my parents worked (unusual in that era) and we had a daytime housekeeper/babysitter, partly there for housework and partly there so an adult was home when my sister and I returned home from school. Mom had no "help" on weekends and thus was forced to launder my whites on weekends.
This program still operates today under the auspices of the San Diego Police (see video) though the uniforms have been, shall we say, modernised.
See video for a classic uniform plus kids decked out in contemporary gear. When I was on the force it was all boys at our school, though a few schools were beginning to include girls (late 1960s).
We had a changing room and were expected to be in our "whites", so you had to change out of civvies and into your whites, and then back into civvies after one's shift (there were five shifts in all to cover before school, lunch period--because children were allowed to go home for lunch in those days, plus the Kindergartens were either am or pm shift but not all day, so they were coming and going during lunch) and two after-school shifts (dismissal was at 2 pm for the youngest students, 3:15 pm for the older kids, though some of the 2 pm group stayed until 2:30 pm for special reading classes---so in effect there were three dismissal times).
White trousers could be either white khaki-type cloth (called "white ducks" in those days) or, if you could find them, white jeans were allowed and in the long run proved to be more durable. JC Penney was about the only store then that carried white jeans. You took your whites home on a hanger on Fridays for laundering and brought them back to school on Monday.
At first, mom thought we could make do with one pair. The shirt was short-sleeved, and she thought that was a waste because there were few other occasions when I could wear it (long sleeved shirt needed for church or fancy occasions, no one would wear short sleeved white unless he was a Mormon missionary).
Her plan proved to be short-lived, as she discovered that she had to run a load of laundry, like it or not, over the weekend and it HAD to be ready by Monday. I think on the pretense of white jeans being more rugged (and easier to hem up to allow for growth), a second pair of whites was purchased, with the trousers being jeans. That way she didn't HAVE to launder a solitary set between Friday night and Sunday night, which I imagine was annoying if there was not a full load of whites waiting to be washed.
(@Laundress: I learned to wash clothes the night before I left for college. I was allowed to operate the dryer ONLY during high school and was expected to move clothes from washer to dryer, then remove and fold, but she was certain I would "ruin" everything I washed---in retrospect that was poor planning, better to send off a kid to college who is versed in laundry).
We were excused from whites on rain days, because no one could see your uniform if you were bundled up in a fireman-style raincoat with all the clasps.
The photo below is from c. 1967 in front of our house (I am at right) with pals Robbie and Terry. Mom's gray 1963 Dodge 400 wagon is in the garage. One of the perks* of being a "patrol boy" was a free monthly movie (Saturday matinee) at the Fox Theater downtown, but you were admitted free only in uniform, so you had to bring the full uniform home on Friday for that to happen. One hapless parent was drafted to drive us downtown, and a second parent was assigned pick up duties. Otherwise, the caps and sweaters never left the school. I mostly had button-down white/blue/yellow Oxford cloth shirts, this regular collar shirt---looks like it was thrown on in a hurry---must have been an exception. In nearly all of my school portraits, I'm wearing some sort of button down shirt. Anyway, bringing my whites home on a wooden hanger on Fridays and bringing them back to school on a Monday was a ritual for two and a half years. Luckily we lived only two blocks from the school, some of the kids had to carry their whites for a mile or more (in the pre-back pack era...).
*Other perks included:
---the ability to store contraband (water pistols, candy, Playboy magazine) covertly in the changing room.
---a free day at Sea World or the San Diego Zoo each year. My parents had passes to both attractions, but I was aware even then that for many this was a rare treat.
---a free week at camp in the mountains at the end of sixth grade for the "retiring" sixth grade boys. This sounds really great, except for one thing. Nearly all of the patrol boys in our schools were selected from the "gifted" (then called MGM, Mentally Gifted Minors Act, 1961) class. Patrol Boys might miss 15-20 minutes of class time per day, depending on shift, and they were expected to learn on their own whatever had been taught in their absence: the teacher simply assigned more homework and you learned it on your own. Nearly all of these boys were college-bound and enrolled in the fall (seventh grade) in full college preparatory Spanish class. In order to take this class, one had to make up required classes in art and music (displaced from the schedule by full court press Spanish) for seven weeks during summer school, through early August. The camp was held in July, and NO ONE from my school was able to attend, due to summer school requirements. Summer school was odd, there were remedial classes, plus classes with less rigorous courses such as art and music----these were populated by honors students (anything but remedial) who were "getting requirements out of the way" so there would be more room to tackle serious subjects (science, math, social studies, foreign language, etc) during the normal school year. Only about 1/4 to 1/3 of San Diego's elementary schools had a "gifted class" (if your neighborhood school didn't have one and you qualified by testing, you were eligible to transfer to a school that did have the program), and I suspect that at non-MGM schools, while the Patrol Boys were still selected partly on their school marks, they probably were not as heavily skewed toward being university-bound as my school was....and who were probably not as enthusiastically guided toward a rigorous college prep course selection as Mrs. Brenner guided/pushed us. The only people I ever met who went to Patrol Boy camp were ones who had attended non-MGM schools, where perhaps there was less emphasis on university preparation.
