Those Who Ironed Before Me

In 2008 I emailed Mom about the old wooden family ironing board I still use and printed out her answer, taping it to the underside: “bought for $2.00 in 1955 in a State Street junk store.” She and Dad were newlyweds, and it was the golden age of ironing. I first saw her cry, over a neighbor's rude remark, while she was ironing out on the porch (it was summer). I was between ages 3 and 5 and horrified. That’s my first memory of this ironing board.

In the '70s the heavy awkward thing became mine and I hauled it to the 10 or so places I lived until settling here in 2001, by then ironing at most four times a year. A week ago I saw the board’s butt end had been soaked and its cover shredded, and thought: Buy a new ironing board? Naw. I’ll simply buy a new cover. So I did. Stripped the old cover off--it had been stapled on--and saw the full-length crack in the board’s “table,” rendering it worthless but not useless.

Googling, I learned this three-legged style was first manufactured around 1914 and that metal legs replaced wooden ones in the 1940s, giving me the board's approximate age. I turned the board over looking for a manufacturer’s label or stamp. Nothing. But besides the note I’d taped to the underside was writing I’d never noticed before. Handwriting. Only some of greenish lettering was readable.

This much was clear:

 ________ d A. Dixon

______________________ Wis.

Probably the previous owner who’d junked the thing! With light and magnification I finally confirmed the name as “Fred A. Dixon.” No, not “Freda.” That “A.” is clearly an initial. Plus I cannot imagine any female so attached to her ironing board she’d write her name and hometown on it. What, is she taking the ironing board to camp, or worried it'll be confused with someone else's?

Where the ink had worn away, faint impressions in the wood allowed me to confirm the first letter of the town as “W,” resembling the fancy “W” in “Wis.” (My hometown with the junk shop begins with “R.”) Fragments of other letters were just visible. Might it be two words?

The town name’s final letter, I thought, looked like “h.” “Beach”? There is no Wisconsin town called anything “Beach.” Or did it say “Fish”? That was more likely. The top of a capital “t” was followed by the top of a capital “e.” The answer was probably “Whitefish”. . .

But there’s no Whitefish, Wisconsin. Whitefish Bay is in the next county to the north, but believe me, no native calls it Whitefish because then we can’t make the standard joke about that wealthy suburb, calling it “Whitefolks Bay.” There’s a Whitewater, Wis. But the final letter before the “Wis.” was not an “r.” The storm outside had knocked out my Internet, so I pursued this puzzle, thinking that “h” might be a “d.”

Then I saw it: Waterford!

Waterford is a village in the same county as my hometown.

Census records from 1940 list the household of Fred A. Dixon, 57, of Waterford, Wisconsin as himself and his wife Lulu, 56; their son and daughter-in-law, ages 31 and 29; and three children under age 4. They used the ironing board a lot. So did Mom, who sprinkled water on clothes and rolled them in towels before pressing them, and also darned socks over a light bulb.