Waddell’s – The Wonderland of Televisions and Appliances

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• Oh, and by the way, I got my arm caught in the wringer as well. My mom kept a laundry basket on a stool under the last laundry tub and I stood there to "help" her one fateful day and ended up with my arm gridning in the wringer! Not one scar to show for my mother's horror!

• Washday on Mondays only? Is this from a single-person household? I couldn't imagine doing laundry on one particular day only--that does not compute--unless you have an unlimited stash of clothing and bedding. My mom did wash every day but Sunday--the one day of "rest" where she "only" had to make 3 meals from scratch for 8 people, and clean up and wash dishes by hand afterwards. There were always 4 long clotheslines in constant use; on rainy days, out came the wooden-rack clothes dryers with constant turning and re-arranging of damp clothes--for those not lucky enough to have a basement for indoor clotheslines.

  As for those wringer washers, those damned things are instruments of the devil; I nearly lost my arm in the wringer in a jumble of laundry. My mom had no use for the machine, either, and preferred to do all the laundry in the bathtub, wringing by hand. I was very, very happy when I got my first automatic washer!

• Ernie had a beautiful ranch style home on Riverside Drive East, west of Lauzon Road, and at Christmas time it had a fantastic display with Santa, his sleigh and reindeer (including a blinking red-nosed Rudolph) on the roof. He was quite a flyer himself and in the early '70s owned the most expensive private aircraft ( a Piper Navajo) based in Windsor at that time.

• Thanks for running the Waddell's story. I remember as a small child accompanying my grandmother , who lived on Wellington , to Waddell's to purchase one of those old style wringer washer's which she continued to use well into the 80's. I still have an old stereo console ( made with actual hardwoods ) that my grandparents bought there. And it still works , phonograph and all. Quality seems to be synonomous with history. THANKS AGAIN JAYPEE

• wow, thanks for the story Urbanrat !!! what a pain!! so i opened a can of worms huh? lol that's alright with me, i liked your story :)

• Susan, send an email to Andrew and ask him to forward it on to me. At the time of the story, we were living on Olive road just south of Seminole and my sister and I went to David Maxwell school.

  Steve, you're right about some families, large families did laundry everyday except Sunday as I noted above, at the time of the story there were only four in our family with my brother being born in the late fifites.

  LOL! So there are at least three of us who stuck their hands and arms into the wringer! I wonder how many more of us are out there that did that. How times have changed, Imagine today if there was a product on the market like those wringer washers and just one kid put his/her hand and arm into it, imagine the hew and cry for product recall and the alarm bells going off, the media frenzy!

• ...but how did you ALL manage to get your arm pulled in in the first place? LOL!
  were they electric or did you just plain ol' crank your own arm in till you got scared?? lol
  Urbanrat, since there's alreay the 3 of you just on this post alone, i'm willing to bet 6/10 kids who's mom had one did it at least once!
  don't ask where i got that number from lol

• Yes Aaron, the machines were electric. You got your arm stuck (yes, it happened to me too), because you had to "feed" the clothes into the wringer. Once that wringer got ahold of your finger, usually wrapped up in the clothing, sheets, etc., it grabbed you till the "stop bar" on top of the wringer unit was hit hard enough to make it stop. You didn't dare pull the plug because your hands were always soaking wet .... After my arm got caught up once, we started using a wooden rod to push the clothes with, you should have seen that think fly through the air if it got caught in the wringer and made it out the other side. Memories, ahh yes, lol.

• Susan, you described that wringer to a T. I recall helping with the HUGE loads of laundry, wanting to go fast to tackle it, and having my arms get all wrapped in the jumble of wet laundry going through in assembly-line fashion. And you can't move your arm out fast enough when that happens--picture that scene on I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel can't keep up with wrapping the barrage of fast-moving chocolates on the assembly line...

  Yes, Urbanrat--about daily wash days--not to diminish smaller families, but with increased numbers comes increased numbers of wash days... You're right: these days, the manufacturers would be sued if anyone hurt himself on a wringer washer.

  I don't know what was more scary: having an arm accidentally leading into the wringers, and being unable to pull it out fast enough, or hearing that God-awful popping noise and seeing that stop mechanism go flying up when it became overloaded! It's burned into my memory; there's no other noise or action like it!

  And who hasn't forgotten to start with the whites and end with the colours in the wash water?

  Yes, the old stereos were made to last; there was one from the 50s in my family, and all it needed was minor repairs over the years--such as a new needle for the phonograph. And they were so homely, they were attractive, on those gangly legs.

  In reference to wringer washers, thank God for automatic washers!

• LOL!! thanks Susan! those are some.......great memories lol