Ángel Franco/The New York Times
A SIMPLE SOAK, A HEARTY SCRUB The Columbia Washboard Company of Logan, Ohio, the last maker of washboards in the country, has seen business increase since receiving orders from troops overseas. Betty Ellinger, 58, above, the floor manager, assembling a board. More Photos >
By DAN BARRY
Published: May 5, 2008
LOGAN, Ohio

Another special request came in the other day to the old brick factory on Gallagher Avenue, where pride — if not much profit — is taken in being the country’s last maker of washboards. A worker, one of only four, all women, reached for an empty box and began to fill the order.

Enlarge This Image

Ángel Franco/The New York Times
The company sends its packages overseas complete with instructions

One metal washtub

One coil of clothesline

One pack of clothespins

Two bars of soap

Six tins of foot powder

And one washboard: No. 2133-F, the new and very slight variation of old reliable, No. 2133, also known as the Dubl Handi.

Although this Dubl Handi washboard would be shipped far away to ease the complications of these times, it was expressly designed for another time, a time when weary traveling salesmen would retire to some boardinghouse room with socks and underwear damp from the sweat of the hard sell. They’d reach for their Dubl Handi — “Just the Right Size to Fit a Bucket, Pail or Lavatory” — and begin scrubbing away.

The washboard was dubly handi because one side featured corrugated spirals that could free the most stubborn stains, while the other side offered a wavy rumble to address the more, uh, sensitive fabrics. That’s right, ladies: “Ideal for Silks, Hosiery and Lingerie.”

The Columbus Washboard Company, makers of the Dubl Handi and other models, must have employed salesmen offering captivating personal testimony, judging by its old, handwritten ledger, which indicates that nearly 1.3 million washboards were sold in 1941. That was a company best, recorded beside a small notation: “Dec. 8, 1941 — War declared.”

After that, Columbus Washboard slipped slowly into the pail of quaintness, as postwar America chose sleek washing machines to soak, soap, rinse and spin. By 1999, the family that started the company a century before was poised to pull the plug, had there been one. But news of its imminent closing prompted someone to say they knew the perfect couple to keep the operation going, a contractor and seamstress named Bevan and Jacqui Barnett. This new business opportunity was breathlessly presented to them with one word: washboards.

Who knows why, but that word lodged itself in the shared Barnett consciousness. With several other investors they bought the company and trucked the assets — ancient machines, piles of wood, rolls of galvanized metal — some 50 miles southeast to Logan, where they lived.

They cleaned out the deserted shoe factory on Gallagher Avenue, learned to maintain and operate the machines, and began producing washboards.

“I just figured it out,” recalls Mr. Barnett.

He returned to contracting, while his wife assumed day-to-day oversight of the factory. She reacquainted old clients with this old reliable, began a Web site and established an annual musical washboard festival in Logan, a small city that needed the economic boost. Under the new management, the company’s sales spiked to 70,000 washboards in 2000.

Business slowed in 2001, then all but died after the attacks of Sept. 11; if irony was dead, as someone famously and wrongly said, then quaintness was positively buried. Ms. Barnett reduced the staff to four, including herself, and opened the factory’s doors to any tourist interested in, say, the difference between the Maid-Rite model and the Sunnyland.

The country was poised for another war; no notation was made in the ledger of the Columbus Washboard Company. But it did receive an e-mail message one day from an Army captain in Kuwait. Originally from Marysville, about 80 miles north of Logan, he was now leading a tank company of 75 soldiers — and boy, could they use some washboards.

At that point, Ms. Barnett and the other “girls,” as she calls them, created the No. 2133-F. Instead of the words Dubl Handi stamped on the washboard, there now appeared an American flag — hence the F. They quickly shipped 70 of the 2133-Fs overseas.

“That’s the perfect board,” says Ms. Barnett, 62, who wears her four feet of long brown hair in a neat, braided bun.

After receiving more interest from soldiers overseas, Ms. Barnett researched what troops away from a base might need and soon developed a kit that included her washboards, pails made in Mexico, lye soap made by a church group in Logan, and foot powder — lots of foot powder. (The maker of the stuff had decided to go into a different business, and donated thousands and thousands of tins of something called Odor K’Zam.)
Multimedia

Slide Show For Soldiers, the Perfect Washboard






A system was born. Tourists began contributing money to cover the $25 cost of assembly and shipping to theaters of war. As word spread, more donations arrived by mail: from a group of retired Grumman Corporation employees in upstate New York; from a veteran of two wars now living in Oklahoma; from the Worthy Matron of the Seven Hills Chapter #589 of the Order of the Eastern Star, in Milford, Ohio.

Letters and e-mail floated back from grateful recipients, many of them saying the washboards served as a handy backup to the military’s laundry service, and some of them expressing surprise at the usefulness of the contraption. “They work pretty good, too,” wrote an Army sergeant who closed with his signature and the words Operation Enduring Freedom.

In this way, the very word was not relegated to adjectival duty in time of war: the “washboard roads” of Iraq; the “washboard abs” of a marine from Pennsauken, N.J., killed by sniper fire. A washboard was just a washboard.

Since that Army captain from Marysville first inquired about washboards more than five years ago, more than 175 soldiers from Ohio have died in Afghanistan and Iraq: from Zanesville and McConnelsville, Pomeroy and Chagrin Falls. Meanwhile, the Columbus Washboard Company has sent a few thousand washboards overseas.

Only one has come back. The women say they hope its return meant the intended recipient had simply moved on. They sent it back, addressed to Any Soldier.

The orders, usually placed by relatives of soldiers, go up and down. Weeks go by without any, and then suddenly there are a dozen. Or just one — like the request that came in the other day, from the aunt of a marine.
Each of the four workers at the Columbus Washboard Company played a role, as country music played and Squeak, the fattest cat you ever saw, waddled around the old machinery and piles of wood.

Lisa Jarrell, 44, stepped away from the nailing machine to lay the items in a box. Betty Ellinger, 58, the floor manager, swaddled them in bubble wrap and taped the cardboard box shut. Laura Lyon, 42, who works in the office, printed out the address label and affixed it to the top of the box.

Then Ms. Barnett carried the box to her 1991 Plymouth Voyager van and drove a half-mile to the post office, around the corner from some boarded-up stores. She got in line and, on behalf of this country, she waited.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/us...9AxtXla0QRbctw

More than one way to serve one's country!
Jag