the cassandra pages

22. Men (part 2)

A tintype of Charles Rush Miller, my great-great-grandfather. Another photo is here.

Inez says that the girls were always “a bit scared” of Charles Giles, but they had a different opinion of their other grandfather, Charles Rush Miller. My grandmother adored him and always described him as being confident, happy, and not giving a damn about what anyone else thought of him. He was a farmer and a skilled carpenter and cabinet-maker; at 70 he built a beautiful heavy horse-drawn sleigh for his son, Wallace, which Inez said “carried many parties of people, young and old, after it arrived in South Otselic.”

He was also a skilled woodsman and lover of the fields and streams, and probably encouraged the little girls in what became a lifelong interest of their own. When I was little, Inez used to tell me how he had once found a den of baby foxes whose mother had been trapped and how the girls begged him to tell and retell the story of reaching in and taking the cubs out one by one.

He hunted deer in the “North Woods” and small game nearer home. He was a trout fisherman of great skill, spending many summer days at his son’s home, helping in haying and fishing the Middletown and other streams he had known all his life. With a granddaughter to drive him in a buggy to the source of a stream, he would vanish for most of a day, returning weary, with sagging shoulders at night, but never with empty creel. He always fished with worms, carried in a little bait-box, slung by a strap from his shoulder, his fish-basket, lined with ferns, on the opposite side.

Wallace Miller, my great-grandfather, as a young man

It’s odd, considering how large Libby looms in the family’s history, but I don’t know much about Wally, my great-grandfather Miller. My mother and grandmother certainly loved him dearly. He died suddenly, of a massive stroke or heart attack, quite a long while before I was born, before the war, I believe.

Wally in his late years

These two men – Charles Rush and Wallace – must have given my grandmother an affection for men, even if she refused to kowtow to them. She always told me, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that it was important to make men feel that you thought they were indispensable, while being perfectly capable of standing on your own two feet. She was very fortunate to find my grandfather, who loved her completely and was willing to wait on her and put up with her independent spirit and strong opinions; she, for her part, was devoted to him as well, and they were an inseparable team for over sixty years, known by everyone in our town. My grandmother had a fast mind and a tongue to match, while he was tremendously patient.

My grandmother often quoted poetry, and also loved doggerel. One of her favorites, trotted out on appropriate occasions, was "Patience is a virtue, learn it if you can -- Seldom found in women, and never in a man," but she had married someone who was the exception.

My grandfather and me in the woodworking shop, 1986

If my grandfather did lose his temper on a rare occasion, you knew he must be very angry. Instead of lashing out when he got frustrated with his wife, though, he usually retreated to his big woodworking shop in the stone cellar, where he kept a bottle of gin to calm his nerves and could saw or sand in peace until he was calm and ready to go back upstairs. He was an excellent restorer of antique furniture, and taught my father to be a fine woodworker as well; the two of them spent many hours in the shop as well as working together in the real estate business during the day. My grandfather was also just plain lucky – at life, and at cards. Learning to playing bridge with him was quite an experience. He never got rattled, and like my mother could remember all the cards. He and my mother or grandmother would be partners, against my father and me, and we would watch in amazement as he’d win the bidding at 3 No Trump and calmly and confidently proceed to take every trick, then gather up the cards and, smiling a little bit to himself, say something offhand like, “That worked out pretty well.”

Note

I've added some missing photos - one of my father to the post on "The War" and a photo of Henry Miller and his pioneer house in South Dakota on "Emigration." There's also a new paragraph in that one with the secret of why Henry went west - I knew I had it somewhere and found that I'd written it down in 1985 when my grandmother told it to me.

21. Men (part 1)

Charles Giles Adams' 90th birthday, 192x. He is seated in the middle of the second row; my grandmother is directly in front of him on the grass. Inez is in the back row, third from right.

Before this, I’ve been writing mostly about the Clark-Miller side of the family – the ancestors of Libby’s husband, Wallace Miller. On the other side, Libby’s father and mother were Charles Giles Adams and Sophia Foote. The Adamses were descended from Darius Adams, born in 1774, who came to Sharon Springs, New York in 1792, and then to South Plymouth (near Beaver Meadow) in 1803. Darius and his wife Martha Simons (aha! another Martha!) had eleven children. Most of them eventually drifted west, but the youngest was Charles Giles, my great-great-grandfather, who stayed.

He married a neighbor, Betsy Lowenza Taylor, and she died just a year later, leaving their baby son, Lorenzo. Inez writes that he always kept a few mementos of her locked away, such as bits of jewelry she had worn, including a pair of gold hoop earrings. He once showed them to Inez’s cousin Julia, who admired them and asked if she could wear them. He said yes, if she’d also wear another like them in her nose!

In 1854, shortly after Betsy’s death, Charles married Sophia Foote. (The Foote family farm is the beloved Beaver Meadow farm where Inez, Grandma, and Minerva eventually grew up - Libby describes how the family got there in chapter 8 of this story.) Charles and Sophia had four daughters:
Florence, Helen, Alice, and Libby, and later, two sons, Grant and Jessie.

In 1866, the family moved for ten years to Cazenovia, New York – then a very sophisticated and wealthy town compared to the rural hamlet of Beaver Meadow. Cazenovia was also quite far away. The truth about the family’s unusual move remains a mystery, but Inez speculated about the reason:

It has always been said that this was done to give the older girls the advantage of the educational facilities there. However there may have been other factors inducing the move just at that time. There had been some gossip about a child of Olive Brown, a neighbor’s girl who worked for grandmother.

In 1876 the two older girls graduated and the family came back to Beaver Meadow. Lorenzo, who had been overseeing the farm for the last two years, had married his stepmother Sophia's niece, a young woman named Ada Benjamin. They quarreled and she went back to her family. Charles Giles went to see her and tried to patch things up, and Lorenzo went to get Ada. When he arrived, she was sitting on the porch with another young man, a neighbor, who Lorenzo had suspected as being the reason for Ada’s discontent all along. According to the story, he drove by the house without stopping and never came back. Lorenzo then entered college at Northwestern University and soon came down with typhoid fever. Charles Giles went to get him but he died there in 1878.

There was more tragedy in store: the little boy, Grantie, contracted dysentery from polluted drinking water and died. Some of the older girls, brought back to the wilderness from the sophistication of Cazenovia, had rather inappropriate love affairs. Ten years after the family returned, Jesse, 14, was shot in the leg when he and another boy were climbing over a fence and Jesse’s gun went off accidentally. The local doctor had limited knowledge, and Charles Giles refused at first to consent to an amputation when the leg became infected. When he did agree, it was too late, and Jesse, the only surviving son, died.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Inez, my Grandmother, and Minerva all shared a definite attitude of female superiority. It seems to me that this may have come from their own mother, Libby, both because of the superior education she and her sisters had received but also because Charles Giles, and perhaps Lorenzo too, had been considered stubborn and selfish. Sophia looks sad and long-suffering in her pictures, though Libby says she had a good sense of humor. I wonder if she harbored resentment and sorrow at the loss of Grant and Jesse and blamed her husband – and who knows what she felt about the neighbor girl!

Sophia died in the early 1990s, not long after she and Charles Giles went to live in the nearest “big” town – the county seat, Norwich. Libby and Wally took over the farm, and Charles Giles spent his summers there. In his very old age, he quarreled with Libby’s next older sister, Alice, who wanted him to dispose of his horse to make room for the automobile she planned to buy. To spite her, he bought a new house in Norwich and married an elderly woman to keep it. When he died, at age 90, he left a provision in his will requiring his four daughters to support his widow until she died.

20. ...and Return

Libby (left) and her sister Alice in about 1865. This picture was always in a small frame in my grandmother's bookcase.

 

We think of people going west and never returning, but some did. In Libby’s memoir, “Heaven and Hell in the (18)60s," she tells the story of one family who made the journey in hopes of finding a better life. Most of this memoir is based on recollections of her mother, Sophia Foote Adams.

There came a time when Kansas land was being greatly exploited. Several families from this district migrated thence in response to glowing invitations to acquire cheap new land under very flattering conditions. We were then surprised with the announcement that the Elder (the pastor of the small Baptist Church) with his family, two sons and a young daughter, were going to join his eldest son who had married and gone to settle there before them.

A farewell donation was given them and a large gathering assembled for the occasion. This was to be held on account of greater space, in the new hotel, and would be an oyster supper. On these occasions the housewives seemed to vie with each other in offering up their finest culinary productions. There were oysters, stewed and raw, scalloped and fried; cold meats of every description, baked beans, breads of wheat, corn, and rye; jellies, preserves, cakes, cookies and pies. A farewell offering was presented, amounting to more than one hundred dollars, which was considered quite magnificent.

I find it amazing that they were able to procure oysters, which must have represented the height of luxury in those days - they must have come in a barrel, by train, from Boston to Norwich or Utica, and then have been fetched by some of the men with a horse and wagon.

Whispers went round that the affair was to last only till midnight, when the owner of the hotel, who had extended his hospitality, would arrange a dance. This proved to be true. Farewells were said and departing friends had reduced the gathering but the Elder was so gratified with his parting gift that he wish publicly to thank the donors. So with sets formed on the dancing floor and the music about to begin, the parson appeared, and after making a short speech of acceptance knelt down on the floor and offered up a prayer for their spiritual welfare.

Libby notes earlier in the memoir that the Elder was known for his eloquent preaching.

For a few years the little church was without a regular pastor and meetings were held by any nearby minister who could be engaged, and the church seemed to lapse into innocuous desuetude. But, suddenly, it became known that the Elder was returning – in fact, was already on the way. They had loaded all their possessions into a large covered wagon like those of the pioneers and this was their home. At night they slept encamped beside the road. The sons had acquired a band of horses, which, it was said, were to be acquired in Kansas for a song. These followed the wagon and fed on whatever they could find by the way. Certain ones were exchanged for driving and the whole band were expected to furnish a means of revenue upon returning in the east. Upon pleasant nights the sons slept outside where the horses were bunched together. It proved to be a long trek, consuming most of the summer, but they arrived at last, brown and seedy, at home again and happy to be once more in a land of plenty. Many were the stories told of their experiences in a strange environment. Torrential rains had washed their vegetables out of the ground and winds of hurricane strength came and blew them away till at last all they had to eat were corn dodgers and salt.

So another donation was given for them and everyone marveled to see how ravenously they ate. This time there was need for clothes and supplies of every kind to start them living again. Cashmere for a new dress was given the wife and the donors whispered among themselves with smiles that she “wished it were made.”  

The Elder soon took up his work again as shepherd of the little Baptist flock but he seemed to have suffered physically from his experiences. Old age was creeping upon him and not many more years were given him.

19. Emigration

Henry Miller in South Dakota

In the 1880s, two of my great-great-grandfather’s brothers, Lucien and Henry Miller, emigrated to South Dakota, taking their aged father, Lewis Miller, with them. Lucien left behind the bodies of two infant daughters who are buried in the Stanbro cemetery near Beaver Meadow along with his mother, Minerva Clark Miller, and his brother Silas, but his two sons went with him. One, Lewis, only lived a short time, but Walter became the father of nine children.

Inez didn't put this story in the genealogy, but my grandmother told me that Henry had "had to get married," and didn't want to. At the altar he turned to the woman and said, "You can kiss my ass," walked out of the church and immediately packed up and headed West. He came back once to visit the family, and she remembers him as a lovely, sweet man who paid a lot of attention to each of the girls.

My great-great-grandfather, Charles Rush Miller, made at least one trip west to see his brothers -- or perhaps it was when his father died. Two things he had brought back from that trip always hung in my grandparents’ “back room”: an Indian peace pipe carved of red stone, and a terrifying club made of a round, fist-sized rock fixed with leather bands to a wooden shaft that was decorated with tiny glass beads; both were authentic articles he had received in some sort of meeting with native Indians in the Dakotas. It was always a big treat when my grandparents took these things down off the wall and let us handle them.

Aunt Inez, Grandma, and my Aunt Meredith always maintained connections with this branch of the family, keeping up a correspondence by mail and going a few times to visit. Some of the South Dakota relatives also came back here. My cousin Barbara and I corresponded with one of our South Dakota cousins, Nancy, when we were teenagers, and Barbara eventually went out there in 1971 to school at South Dakota State – amusingly known as SDS U.

18. Driving

The jeep careened around the corner onto Nowers Road, barely staying on all four wheels. “Jesus H. Mahogany Christ,” said my father. My heart was beating very fast, and I clutched the steering wheel hard as we went down the straightaway. I slowed down and pulled over, shakily.

Learning to drive wasn’t too easy. Although Dad and I usually got along very well, doing things together, we clashed when he was the teacher and I was the student. I didn’t like being told what to do, and this was a situation where that was rather necessary. I also didn’t like not being good at things, or not being able to master them quickly. Using the jeep as a learning vehicle probably wasn’t such a great idea, though – I don’t think we did it again. My mother was patient and endlessly kind, so she did the bulk of the sitting-while-I-drove: down the familiar highway, around the town, around the lake, offering a few suggestions now and then, never getting too riled up or jumpy. My father did the jump-off-the-deep end parts, taking me to an iced-up parking lot to practice controlled skids, teaching me to parallel park, driving on interstates and in traffic. I had plenty of outbursts; he tried to be patient but got mad back; we are, and always were, a lot alike. I always swore I wouldn’t get in the car with him again, but of course I did. It was the same when he taught me to sail. It was OK to get mad and frustrated, or even to jump off the boat and swim to shore, but he never let me quit: I’m very grateful. And I’m grateful that my mother and I were not so alike in temperament: it kept me from fighting with her – we almost ever had words - and allowed us to do many things together happily and peacefully. There was nothing my mother disliked more than conflict.

My father and grandfather both loved to drive and drove constantly, from one end of the county to another, as part of their business. Mom was a good driver, having learned from her own father who was just as patient, kind, and generous as she was, and she and I went places together, but when my father was in the car, she deferred to him. Neither my grandmother nor my aunt ever learned to drive at all: my grandmother was basically lazy and enjoyed being waited on and driven around, and my aunt blamed her inability on her left-handedness. Neither of them really needed to drive – my grandfather was more than happy to drive anywhere, and my grandparents often drove to the farm to take my aunt uptown to the store. It was recreation.

On Sundays my grandparents often took a drive over the hills, just to look around at the beautiful scenery of the Chenango and Otselic valleys, or to visit relatives and friends. My father told me recently that before I was born, and when I was very small, they all used to go to Beaver Meadow nearly every weekend for a drive or a picnic. The last time I went there with my grandparents was at my request – I had wanted to see the family gravestones and try to remember what was where. My grandfather, in his eighties then, drove right off the road at one point. My grandmother never blinked, but sat, quietly queenlike in the front seat, until he got the car back under control. Not long after that, another elderly man in town had a serious accident in which someone got badly hurt. My grandfather heard about it and put the car into the garage and said, “That’s it.” He was like that: graceful, aware of his own limitations, and not inclined to rage against inevitabilities. My mother was too.

Hardly anyone in my high school class drove to school; in fact one of my own recurrent dreams is that I'm back there, but have my own car. Strange. But I think it has to do with how trapped I felt then, in that small town, without really knowing it, and how a car became a means of independence. Still, I didn't get my license until I was out of college and working, and for the first time in my life very much needed my own car. My parents saved and paid for every cent of my education, at considerable sacrifice to themselves, but unlike nearly all parents today, they felt I should earn the money for the other things I wanted. I had a job as a naturalist with the State of New York, and I saved and bought a car, with some help from them. And that was it: I moved out of their house at the lake into the upstairs of my grandparents' house, and that winter spent a lot of days commuting between Cooperstown, where my boyfriend lived, and our town, where I was working. It was a very snowy winter and I learned how to drive in terrible conditions -- which was good, because the next summer I moved to New England. The road, drawn like a curving line between us, became the path between my old life and the new, and the car, the mail, and the telephone the vehicles that carried my love and life back and forth between the two. My ancestors had come from there; now I went back, further away than anyone in the family had gone in generations, except my great-great-uncles who had gone to the west. But I went east, and north.

17. The War

My father, soon after he enlisted.

Every generation has its war.

For my parents it was World War II. In the early fifties, as I came into consciousness of the world around me, and the fact that history hadn’t started with my own birth, I realized there had been this thing in the past called “the war”. It felt like a living but distant person, or a place, perhaps, that had been known and visited by everyone in the house except me. My father and Uncle Dick had both served, in the army and navy respectively, and both had been involved in serious action. But this was fairly common, in our small town: many young men had gone. Some had come back, and some had not.

In the front parlor was a photograph of Corky, a young man in my mother’s class who had been a particular friend of the family and, I gathered, had had a romantic interest in my mother. He had gone down with his ship in the Pacific. In addition to the photograph, displayed along with the family photos, were a few items on my grandmother’s desk that he had brought or sent from Asia; they felt like icons, or relics which had significance to the adults that I couldn’t quite fathom. Later my grandmother told me that he had left some of his clothes in our house, and that when my mother heard he was dead, she took them all out into the back yard and burned them.

In the early years, my father sometimes had nightmares that would wake me in the next room. He had been a tank driver in the infantry in Europe; he had landed at Normandy the day after D-Day and gone on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. He said very little about his war experiences, which had been graphic, exhausting, and sustained, and had included long periods of hospitalization. When he came home, like so many other GIs, he just wanted to try to have a normal life. He was the son of the Methodist minister who had recently been posted to that small upstate New York town, and yet he was the opposite of pious and straight-laced: a bright light who rode into my mother’s life, smiling, on a Harley Davidson. I bet he was the most exciting thing she’d seen for a long time, and very handsome too.

The war made him give up any interest he had had in hunting and guns, even though he had been an expert marksman; one day, while he was renovating an attic space into a den, he took his rifle and walled it up in the closet. He did, however, watch war movies when they started to be shown on television. As the nation began to enter into the years of the Cold War and nuclear arms race, I can remember begging him to turn the sound down because the planes and bombing disturbed me so much when I was trying to go to sleep. (Broadcast media and antennas were an ongoing interest of my father’s, so we had early televisions, and experimental antennas in the attic. At night, walking me up and down the hall to try to get me to sleep, he used to show me the parts of the radios and amplifiers he was working on – apparently one of my first words was “tubes.” Later, I used to help sort the parts for his Heathkit projects and hold things in place while he soldered them.)

Everyone we knew had lost someone in World War II, but the war had also defined and changed them. Dad never joined the VFW or participated in veteran’s parades or communities; his uniform was folded and put away in a trunk, and only taken out once or twice that I remember, probably when I asked to see it. I grew up with the sense that he had seen things none of the rest of us had seen, and that part of his sense of self meant protecting his wife and child from that. He had done it, and never spoke of his service as heroic; he said flatly that war was hell, and became less and less interested and supportive of the military as the years went by. His kneecaps had been shattered in an accident and replaced by steel, and glass from the same accident was still working its way out of his face when I was a little girl. I remember when the movie M*A*S*H, about the Korean War, came out, we went to see it in the theater. I was sitting next to my father, and there was a running gag where someone was always saying, “Goddam Army,” and at the end of the movie, when an officer can’t get a jeep to run, he says, “Goddam Army. Goddam Army jeep!” My father muttered, “'Goddam Army' is right.”

But the funny thing was that the most tangible relic of World War II that we had was, in fact, our jeep – a 1952 Willys army surplus jeep. My father loved to drive it – hotrod it – and when there were kids around, a favorite thing was for him to take us on “wingdings” – hair-raising rides around and around the edges of a nearby gravel pit, and then down the back road where there were some big bumps that would lift us right off the seats. Of course none of us had seat belts or any safety equipment at all, and the exhaust fumes came circling up in the back, making us cough and sometimes get sick, but everyone screamed and begged for more, and he was happy to oblige. My mother often went along, good sport that she was, and she would try also try to keep him under control, but their banter was part of the whole experience – Dad pushing the envelope, Mom trying to reign him in. 

We still have the jeep, and Dad uses it for snow-plowing and hauling brush all the time. I love it, but find it very hard to drive – it’s his vehicle. When Dad and I go off on an errand in it together, it feels like old times - we’re both grinning. It’s very low-mileage – a little more than 30,000 miles – and the body was restored, maybe a dozen years ago. He’s planning to do a valve job on it right away - as soon as Charlie, at the garage, gets the new gaskets in.

16. The Dream

Her dream started in the early seventies, when I began going to cities on my own. I’d take the bus to New York and meet my boyfriend and stay a few days, and later another boyfriend and I went to Chicago and Boston and Washington, D.C., and then I married someone and the day after the wedding we flew across the ocean.

No one in my family had been to Europe since my father had been in the war. I told my mother she could write to me. After we’d been traveling three weeks, we went to an office in Paris, near the Opera, where foreigners could receive mail, and there was an envelope with my mother’s handwriting on it. I opened it and read, “I feel like I am putting a note in a bottle.”

That trip was hard for her, I think. We were gone six weeks and the weekly letters and phone calls we’d always had were impossible; it was long before e-mail. I called a couple of times. In spite of mom’s allergies, my parents had agreed to keep our dog, a big golden retriever, and they told us on the phone that he was fine. They sounded distant: a little awkward, a little amazed, but mostly just stoic. Be careful, they said. Come home safe.

The war had done it, I suppose: made Europe into a thing of distance and fear: fear that the people you loved would never come back. But there was also something she feared about cities. My mother would sometimes tell me about the dream: I’m in a strange city, she said, in a large hotel with long corridors and many doors. I can hear you calling me, but I can’t find you, even though I go up and down the corridors, opening all the doors.

15. Names

Minerva Clark Miller and Lewis Miller

Great-Aunt Minerva got her name from her great-grandmother Minerva Clark, who had married Lewis Miller. In the early 1800s, the young couple rode on horseback from the little settlement of Columbus, on the ridge west of New York State's Unadilla valley, into the broad Chenango valley, and then up over the hills toward Otselic, where they settled and created a homestead. The Clark family had been well-known in politics in Connecticut, where they originally came from, and Minerva’s oldest brother, Rensallier, was a member of the New York State Assembly. There was a sister, Clarissa, and another brother, Silas, who never married; Silas always kept the general store in Columbus. I have his gold pen and a fascinating leather-bound ledger from his store and livery stable, detailing the accounts of the people – including Lewis and Drake Miller - who bought goods there and hired horses. According to Inez, all the Clarks rode a lot, and Silas used to come riding over the hills on horseback to see his sister, Minerva – a trip that must have taken a full day. Minerva brought a shoot of a Bridal rose on her saddle when she first came to Otselic, and for years a cutting from it grew on her grave. I think the trees have grown so much in that part of the cemetery that no rose could grow there now.

Charles Rush Miller

Minerva Clark and Lewis Miller had four sons, one of whom was Charles Rush Miller. He married Martha Salome Arnold, and their son was Wallace, who married my great grandmother, Libby. Libby – named Mary Elizabeth – called her middle daughter (my grandmother) Martha Elizabeth. My mother was also named Martha Elizabeth, and so am I. Since we all lived in the same house, that could have created some confusion, if we hadn't all used different versions of the name.

When Libby's youngest daughter was born, Charles Rush Miller (who was much beloved by his children and grandchildren) came to see his new granddaughter, and asked what name had been chosen for her. Libby and Wally said they hadn't named her yet, because they had thought "she might be a Nathan." "In that case," Charles Rush said, "I would like it very much if you wanted to name her after my mother." There is another Minerva Miller, also a great-grandchild of his mother, in the branch of the family now in South Dakota.

and his wife, Martha Salome Arnold Miller

Now to the Marthas. Inez wrote this about Martha Salome Arnold Miller:

My grandmother Miller came for visits in summer but less often than he (Charles Rush). She was a retiring person and from her, various members of our family inherit a reluctance to mingle in social gatherings or to leave home overnight. She had been much affected, I believe, by an unhappy childhood; a stepmother who was not kind, a father who left for the West with the rest of the family, forsaking her to a life with strict grandparents who believed in a frugal and useful existence. Her brother had been a member of the Monitor’s crew when it sank off Cape Hatteras in 1862. When I was about five years old, she lost her youngest son whom she idolized. For years she kept his watch, wound nightly, on is accustomed tiny stand inside and inverted glass bell, and his cap hanging on its accustomed peg.

If that’s true, then my mother was aptly named – and oddly she, as a "Martha", is the only one of the four of us "M. Elizabeths" who used our first name. My grandmother dropped the "M" all together, but I have always used it as my legal signature. The first time I went to the South Otselic cemetery as an adult, I was a little shocked to see Libby's grave and the inscription: "M. Elizabeth Adams" on it. It's doubly odd because the Adams family which gave me my last name - my father's line - is probably not related to the Adams family on the maternal side at all.

“Salome” lasted another generation as well -  that was Cousin Elsie’s middle name, and I think it suited her, too.

A what?

Two days ago, my post mentioned a "mangle," which prompted some comments, some questions, and the recollection of a great song by MB. Herewith, a brief pictorial digression on 1950s ironing technology:

In case you've never heard of such a thing, the machine we called a mangle was actually an "ironing mangle" - a regular mangle being the rollers on the back of a washing machine that squeezed the excess water out of the cloth.

Ours was not exactly like this, but close.

(images courtesy of jitterbuzz - an amazing site entirely devoted to the history of ironing.)