Even if you have never personally been to a laundromat or needed to use one because you lived in a sucky apartment building that didn’t have a laundry room, you probably know about these places, or at least are familiar with the laundromat scene in the movie Fight Club or have seen a few of them as you drive through the city.

Growing up, my family moved around about every 1-2 years or whenever and wherever my dad could get work as an electrician. Even though we often lived in the boondocks outside of city limits where renting an old farmhouse was cheap, my parents always managed to make sure that a washer and dryer were available for our family of six. It wasn’t until my parents split up that I had my first of many laundromat experiences in 1973 after we moved into a duplex apartment in North Hollywood, or NoHo as it is now called.

My mom would wait until everything was dirty twice-over before overloading a shopping cart – which was somehow appropriated from the Market Basket grocery store on Ventura Boulevard, about 2-miles away – with a mountain of said dirty clothes along with a box of Tide and a white, plastic bottle of Clorox bleach. She wheeled it on down to the laundromat at the northeast corner of Cahuenga and Magnolia Boulevards, usually with my brother and I in tow. We were 10 and 12-years old, respectively. Our local laundromat was adjacent to the Bamford Liquor store, and my mom would sometimes hand over 10¢ to each of us boys to buy some candy to placate us. Our local laundromat was a very basic, utilitarian, no-frills place at the time.

For me, the laundromat was a wonderland of coin-op vending machines. Of course, there was the change machine, plus there was a mini soapbox machine where you could buy a single load sized box of powdered Tide, Cheer, Ivory Snow, or All. You put your coins into the coin slot below your preferred brand of laundry detergent, push the coin slot in, and the soapbox would drop into the metal bin below with a light thud.

There was also a molded, padded TV chair with a small six-inch black and white TV screen and tuner built into it that cost 10¢ for 30-minutes of broadcast TV. In the greater Los Angeles area at the time, the options were channels 2 (CBS), 4 (NBC), 5 (KTLA), 7 (NBC), 9 (KCAL), 11 (KTTV), and 13 (KCOP). That padded, spongy TV chair was the most comfortable seat in the entire laundromat, and someone – generally another mom – was always lounging in it without paying for the television service. They would get annoyed with you if you asked them to move so you could actually watch TV. I watched many reruns of Star Trek at the laundromat.

Directly outside the laundromat door was a ubiquitous Los Angeles Times newspaper vending machine too – 10¢ for the daily paper, 25¢ for the Sunday edition.

There was also one of those 5¢ triple-head candy vending machines inside the laundromat and it didn’t take long for us boys to figure out that the peanuts and bubblegum were perpetually stale in that vending machine so we would go over to the liquor store and buy candy from there where we could get a 3-foot-long whip of purple grape or green apple flavored bubblegum for 10¢. The flavor in that gum was gone in 5-minutes, and the more you chewed it, the stiffer it got. I’m surprised we didn’t get TMJ from chewing that stuff.

Sometimes mom would let us feed the last three dollars of cash that she had in the whole world into the change machine which was sort of a mechanical wonder when you’re a 12-year-old boy. The machine would only accept the dollar bill when oriented correctly and if the paper money was in reasonably good condition. If you put the dollar bill into the slot incorrectly, or if the dollar bill was too faded or crumpled, it would just spit the bill back out looking as if the machine was sticking it’s tongue out at you with a resounding virtual message of REJECT! In those cases, mom would send us over to the liquor store for change, but the liquor store policy was NO CHANGE – DON’T ASK according to a sign on the wall behind the cash register. So, we had to buy 5¢ of candy to get change, which was usually five 1¢ pieces of Bazooka bubblegum. That liquor store was definitely benefiting from the laundromat. I was also secretly hoping that every dollar bill would get rejected so we could buy more candy. I also wondered how many pints of liquor were sold to the laundromat patrons.

When the change machine did accept a dollar bill, the sound of the four quarters hitting the metal tray at the bottom of the machine was glorious – it was like you won the jackpot from a slot machine in Las Vegas!

Mostly out of curiosity but with a potential monetary side benefit, I tried to trick the change machine once by tracing out the face and the back of a dollar bill on a piece of blank translucent tracing paper using a No. 2 pencil and then carefully cutting it out to the exact (well, mostly exact) size of a dollar bill. The anticipation of getting free quarters for a forged dollar bill as it was being fed into the waiting illuminated slot using the correct orientation of George Washington’s head was met with the cold rejection of a machine that was not so easily tricked. So much for my scheme to make more fake bills if it worked. In retrospect, it appears that my juvenile delinquency started earlier than I thought.

The change machine would also give change for coins: two-dimes and a nickel for a quarter, and two nickels for a dime. This was handy for the 35¢ washer and 10¢ dryer.

My mom would use three or four washing machines at-a-time, all in a row if possible, and separate the laundry mostly into whites and colors and transfer the dirty clothes from the shopping cart to the top-loading, large-capacity washing machines. She would tell us which settings she wanted on each load, for example, hot wash and warm rinse for the whites, and warm wash and cold rinse for the colors. She would then tell us how many scoops of detergent or how much bleach to add to each load.

We got to feed the coins into the waiting washing machines too, I think, mostly to continue keeping us boys occupied. We set the coins vertically into the appropriate slots, and then pushed the slotted coins into the machine which, coincidentally, also sounded like a slot machine payout.

However, some of the washing machine coin slots were occasionally jammed with what appeared to be foreign coins or metal slugs which made them completely inoperable. No doubt this irritated the owner/maintenance guy to no end and made him rethink his life choices. Also, what kind of lowlife cheapskate doesn’t have 35¢ for a load of laundry and needs to resort to such measures?

The laundromat also had these high, square laundry baskets on wheels with a hanger bar across the top. The top of the laundry basket was at the same height as the top of the washing machines, so it made loading and unloading clothes easy. These were also great for wheeling your little brother around inside the laundromat as fast as possible much to the irritation of other laundromat patrons sitting around and reading their copy of the Los Angeles Times or Time magazine while waiting for their clothes to finish.

Laundromat environments are this peculiar confluence of heat and humidity blending with the many laundry detergent scents competing with each other as they waft through the air. One moment you definitely smell the fresh scent of Tide and the next moment you get a nose full of flowery smelling Cheer. Occasionally, you’ll get hit with the chemical smell of bleach. Makes me wonder about the long-term hazards of inhaling all this stuff.

One time, I convinced my little brother to get inside one of the massive front-loading dryers under the premise that it was going to be like a carnival ride. He crawled in and sat in it like a recliner and braced himself. I closed the door and popped the dime into the coin slot and selected the cool setting and pressed the start button. There was a low hum as the dryer started to turn slowly and within a couple of seconds my poor little brother was getting the tumble dry treatment which looked like he was doing endless in-place somersaults. He started yelling “STOP!” and I quickly pulled the dryer door open to stop it. He jumped out of it like he was shot from a cannon. He said, “Now, it’s your turn.” I smiled at him, spun around on my heels, and ran out of the laundromat as fast as I could with my brother hot on my heels, as he was hollering, “YOU TRICKED ME!” I heard my mom yell out, “Knock it off boys!” as we passed by.

Eventually, we helped mom transfer the freshly laundered clothes from the washing machines to the dryers, and within the next 40-minutes or so, we were folding laundry and reloading the shopping cart for the return trip back to the apartment. I have a distinct memory of pushing the shopping cart down Cahuenga Boulevard with the pleasant scent of clean laundry in the air.

To be continued next week…

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