My Grandmother's Maytag Bread Box

Looks just like my grandmother's laundry equipment.

I have very early memories of my grandmother, Maria Miele Giordano, hand-washing clothes. She performed this labor-intensive chore just outside the porch door on the side of the house where my grandfather had, at some point, dug a leeching pit covered with flat stones. The wash water would get tossed on the stones where it drained into the pit and leeched into the ground. No danger of throwing a baby out with the wash water with those flat stones in place. It was totally old school and I'm guessing my grandfather dug the pit in the very early 1900s.

I also have not-so-early memories of my grandmother still hand-washing clothes on the side of the house. That's because, even after she was given an indoor electric washing machine, she stubbornly insisted on hand-washing clothes, outdoors, next to the porch door, with a big bucket of hot, sudsy water and a wash board.

I'm pretty sure she learned how to hand-wash clothes when she was a young girl back in the old country before she came to America. She came from peasant stock at a time and place when/where children had to hold their own contributing to the needs of their families.

My grandmother wasn't much for change. She did just about everything the old country/old school way: from cooking and cleaning, to canning fruits and tomato sauce, to feeding the chickens, gathering their eggs, and later slaughtering them for dinner, and so much more. That was done while raising 8 kids, all of them born at home, with no one else to help her until a few of her daughters were old enough to pitch in and help. Different times, for sure.

Back to hand-washing clothes.

A bread box similar to my grandmother's bread box.

At some point, I believe in the early-to-mid 1950s, a few of her children, including my Dad, decided to pool some money and buy her an electric washing machine. They were tired of seeing their Mom outside, hunched over that big aluminum bucket, scrubbing clothes the old fashioned way. The washer looked very much like the one pictured on the right.  They decided to put it in the indoor porch at the side of the house between the side door to the outside and the kitchen. There was a big sink in that room with counter tops on either side of it. It was mostly used for food preparation and little else. It never became a laundry room.

Why? Because my grandmother had another idea for using that washing machine and her idea had nothing to do with washing clothes. Nope. While even her young grandkids, like myself, understood that the machine was meant for laundry, my grandmother saw it as a top-of-the-line bread box.

That's right, she never once used it to wash clothes. Instead, she stored loaves of bread in it. And to be honest, it was a terrific bread box. It kept the bread fresh for days longer. That's because the lid on the washing machine was an air-tight/water-tight lid and what better place to store bread than in a clean, porcelain-lined tub with an air-tight/water-tight lid?

My Aunt Rosie's and Uncle Tony's children in 1947

One of my uncles, Tony Germano, was married to my Dad's sister, Rosie. They had 5 children and all of them lived in Poughkeepsie, NY, which was about an hour's drive North of my grandparent's house in Sloatsburg, NY.

Uncle Tony drove a delivery truck for his father who owned an Italian grocery store and bakery in Poughkeepsie. That's how he met my Aunt Rosie: delivering groceries and bread to my grandparents' home.

After I was born, my uncle still delivered bread to my grandmother and he did so through most of my my younger years. I think he showed up with his deliveries about once a week.  He would drop off a whole bunch of loaves of really awesome Italian bread. Rather than having a dozen or so loaves of bread with no good place to store them, my grandmother solved the problem by using her new washing machine as a bread box.  I always got a chuckle when she or one my aunts told me to go out to the washing machine and get some bread.  Where else would you expect to go to retrieve some bread than a washing machine, right?