Each Fall and Spring, a deep cleaning was called for throughout the entire house in which I grew up. The extent of the actions varied from season to season and year to year, depending upon the history of prior cleaning. Some actions might be delayed with an entire year or more in between. This was certainly true for wallpaper cleaning!
This significant cleaning event called for the purchase of new cans of the dough-like material that looked like, and to a certain extent, smelled like play-dough, that squishy solid used to form strange creatures and, when rolled flat, to copy comic strips from the Sunday newspaper.
Before it was used, wallpaper cleaner had the same pink color as playdough. Afterwards, it was a putrid gray, having been used to erase the grime from the walls in every room needing treatment. The hardened lumps were discarded at the end of the day.
Although cans of the cleaner had to be purchased annually, this expense was less than having to re-paper every few years, even if this practice was the full-time occupation for my grandfather, Luigi, and his eldest son, Joe. We could have purchased new wallpaper at cost. The labor, itself, was free, especially if my mother and father joined in the effort. When they did, I had the task of cleaning up the scrapes remaining from the cut rolls. This was a more limited role than when I was allowed to join the ritual of wallpaper cleaning. When I was very young, I could use a small wad for the lower part of the walls, being very careful not to leave streaks of leftover grime. For some reason, as an adolescent, I was seldom called upon to participate in the erasing.
Seasonal cleaning also included washing curtains. It was a recurring challenge to pin the wet curtains to the drying rack. Special care had to be taken to make sure that the cloth was stretched just right as it was tacked over the series of small pins surrounding the frame. A misjudgment required that the procedure be restarted from the point of the error. An ill-stretched, awkward appearing curtain was not acceptable for covering the cleanly washed window.
Another part of the seasonal event was removing every dish or knickknack from every cabinet, washing each item, and replacing it – often on new shelf-paper, unless it was the kind that was glued directly onto each shelf. Not all of the items were stored in permanent wooden cabinets affixed to the walls. There were a lot of stand-alone metal units which needed attention. Of course, there was also the weekly cleaning – dedicated to dusting and vacuuming floors with a Hoover that had a light on the front, no doubt so you could more readily see where the dirt was. For certain locations there were long tubes with a variety of attachable brushes in order to reach difficult places in corners and in the upholstered furniture filling the rooms.
Although not part of annual housecleaning, there was also the weekly, if not daily, use of the washing machine with its dangerous wringer for squeezing out excess water before hanging everything on lines – outside if the weather permitted, or from lines strung indoors. Washday could always be identified by the humid smell of drying laundry in the basement. Large items, like sheets or towels, might be ironed with a table-sized “mangler” – with its own even more dangerous revolving tubes through which the damp cloth was passed and steamed dried.
Kitchen appliances also required routine cleaning. Fortunately, unlike relatives who lived in the country and were not joined to a gas line and had to use kerosene stoves, ours was a modern gas one, using fuel piped into the house from a network of gas lines rather than directly from butane tanks. Although an electric range was too modern for us, we did have an electric refrigerator with a small, centralized compartment for ice-cube trays. There was no need for a freezer compartment, since frozen food was not common, although Bird’s Eye products could be found in grocery stores.
Not all appliances were large. There were toasters, for example, which opened in the front and back to reveal racks and heating coils for toasting bread. There was no timing-device; the user kept a wary eye on the process to make sure the finished product could be removed without being burned. Nevertheless, scraped toast was acceptable, especially with enough grape or apple jelly on top.
Another small appliance was the meat grinder that was attached by a screw device to a counter or tabletop. Decisions had to be made regarding the appropriate grid to be inserted to assure that the extruded meat would have the right consistency.
Although not part of the kitchen appliances, another small, electrical appliance needed constant attention. The radio. Actually, the radio tubes required attention. They always seemed to be burning out and needing to be replaced. Unless a variety of replacement tubes was kept in the back of a cupboard, a special trip to the hardware shop had to be made. Usually, several tubes were taken in for testing; it was not always possible to identify the burned out one merely by sight. Just because the glass was not black did not mean the tube was usable. Later it was equally difficult to determine which tube needed to be replaced in order to make the television set work.
In fact, when my father would become angry with my mother and me, his major counter action was to remove one of the TV tubes and hide it away until he had been appropriately appeased. We were never sure if the set was not working because of us or because a burned-out tube needed to be replaced. Whether or not wallpaper cleaner needed to be applied, was a much easier decision to make.