a216  1321  05 May 87
AM-Maytag Anniversary, Bjt,0639
Maytag Celebrates Washer's 80th Anniversary
LaserPhoto IC1
By DAVID SPEER
Associated Press Writer
    NEWTON, Iowa (AP) - In its 80-year history, the Maytag washing
machine has helped tame washday drudgery and made the washboard a
museum piece.
    But a historian who has studied household technology says the amount
of time spent doing laundry in the home actually has increased since
the washing machine was developed.
    ''The washing machine took the drudgery out of doing wash,'' said
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, history professor at the State University of New
York at Stony Brook and author of ''More Work For Mother.''
    Rubbing clothes on a washboard ''was the most back-breaking and
unpleasant work that women regularly had to do,'' she said in a
telephone interview.
    But the unanticipated side effect of washing by machine was that
homemakers now spend more time on laundry, because clothes are washed
more frequently and because commercial laundries are used less, she
said.
    ''Although the washing machine saved a great deal of drudgery, it
did not save a great deal of time,'' Ms. Cowan said. ''Every
indication seems to be that the average American housewife today
spends more time doing laundry than her mother or grandmother did.''
    The Maytag Co. is throwing a birthday party for the washing machine
Thursday at its Newton headquarters, to mark 80 years since its
''Pastime'' model came out.
    The Pastime, a wooden tub on legs with an agitator in the lid that
moved when the operator turned a handle, was not the first washing
machine - crude examples had been around for decades. But its success
launched Maytag in the washing machine business, and was the
forerunner of later Maytags that gradually revolutionized home
laundry.
    ''This was great,'' said Rovesa Rucker, director of the Jasper
County Historical Museum. ''This was really an innovation. And it was
so much easier on the clothes.''
    The museum, located in Newton where the Maytag Co. began, has a
display depicting the development of the Maytag from the Pastime to
the 1939 Master Washer, the wringer-type that many people remember
from their their grandmother's basement. Maytag stopped production of
wringer-type washers in 1983, after building 11.7 million in 76
years.
    Maytag began in 1893 as the Parsons Hand Cutter and Self Feeder Co.,
which manufactured agricultural equipment. The Newton museum has a
grain grader and cleaner made by the company.
    ''That didn't go,'' Mrs. Rucker said. ''Nobody was interested in
that.''
    After the Pastime was launched, Fred L. Maytag bought out his
partners and the company began refining the washer, adding electric
and gasoline power, a ''swinging wringer,'' a rot-proof aluminum tub
and the underwater agitator, or ''Gyratator'' as Maytag called it,
which is still used in many automatic washers.
    The ''Gyratator'' innovation in 1922, plus a force of aggressive
salesmen that combed the countryside carrying machines strapped to
the back of their cars, pushed the company to the top.
    ''So popular did this new machine prove to be that during the 22
months following its first appearance, the Maytag Co. advanced from
26th place in the industry to a position of world leadership, a
position retained at the present time,'' said a 1940 article in the
Iowa Journal of History and Politics.
    But even with the advent of the washday workhorse, doing laundry was
not a matter of just dumping a load in the Maytag.
    Marjorie McElhose of Eugene, Ore., wrote to Maytag in 1985,
describing how her mother did the laundry with a gasoline-powered
wringer washer in rural South Dakota in the 1940s and '50s.
    ''Mother did the mechanics herself - filling the motor with gas,
starting and stopping the motor,'' Mrs. McElhose wrote.
    ''She'd be out there early every Monday morning, summer and winter,
carrying in water from the cistern, heating it in the big copper
boiler, then pouring it into the washtub.''
    
AP-NY-05-05-87 1618EDT
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