Yep. Then .....

Growing up in the rural south in the '40s, I helped my grandparents on wash days. Three ten-gallon tubs lined up along the outside wall of the smoke-house, with my grandmother, sleeves rolled up, bent over the first scrubbing tub, using the lye soap she had made and her washboard. Then came two rinses in the other two tubs.

Somewhere in that process all the sheets and other "whites" went into the big cast iron pot of boiling water over the wood fire that my grandfather tended. He had a long paddle or stick that he used to stir, and to lift them out of the water when they were boiled clean and white enough to suit him, then into one of the washtubs.

I don't remember him using any lemon juice, though. In fact, I don't even rememer how it was I "helped".

When my aunt was home she provided the entertainment and encouragemrnent, belting out songs like "Pistol Packing Mama", "Oklahoma Hills Where I Was Born", and "Cocaine" (Early one morning while making my rounds, I grabbed a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down...) made famous again much later by Johnny Cash in his Folsom Prison album. I may have those song titles wrong, but still remember the lyrics! Washday songs, probably helped make the whites even whiter.

Sorry to get so far from the subject.

Wat

Glad you shared.

that just boiling clothes will whiten them? Or was there anything else in the boiling water and you just don't know what it was?

my folks thought it did. Whether it did or not, it seemed to be a little empirical evidence I could add to the OP. (Before I got carried away with all the childhood memories that came flooding back.)

I don't really think they put anything in the water - the only cleaning product I remember in the house was that home made lye soap. They used it for everything - laundry, dishes, floor and wall scrubbing, and I remember my aunt washing her hair in it. Later they used things like Ivory bar soap.

But I don't remember any "additives".

Wat

and mother did it this way before they got the wringer washer and plumbing. I think what made their whites so much whiter than ours today is that they hung them on the line in the sun. Their clothing never went through a clothes dryer, which has a tendency to make clothes look dingy.

One way to get a wine stain out of a white tablecloth, is pouring boiling water through the stain. I have read this hint from every source imaginable, including books on how to get stains out. I know for a fact that you can whiten white washclothes with boiling water.

If I recall, it was a little cube, blue, and you broke off pieces to put into the rinse water to sparkle up the whites.

in the 1950's, she had an old-fashioned wringer washer, too. I remember her running all the clean clothes through the wringer.

higher is better... a lot of modern bleaches are weak...