One of the first things I learned was how to do laundry, a necessary skill for girls in the Korean War era. In those years, laundry wasn’t just a matter of throwing in a load of clothes and going off to the grocery store while it washed.

Laundry was a major production that took the better part of, if not all of, a day – sort the clothes (imperative that whites go in first), one batch at a time in the washer, then once through three tubs of rinse water that got drained and refilled every other load, dip the things to be ironed into the pan of Faultless starch we had cooked on the stove, hang them outside, bring them in when dry. This was a lengthy process, but it wasn’t difficult.

Ironing was.

Mama watched over my initial practice pieces: handkerchiefs, pillowcases and aprons (except the ones with ruffles). Eventually I graduated to more complicated pieces, dresses, shirts and Levis. Everything in those days was cotton and heavily starched, even the Levis.

A never-ending chore

Once dry, the starched clothes were stiff enough to stand on their own, so they had to be “sprinkled” with water before they could be ironed. Hard to imagine in today’s world of “pre-washed for softness” jeans and shirts how stiff those clothes were.

But in those days, everything except towels and underwear got starched and ironed. Needless to say, ironing was a never-ending chore.

My memories of standing over the ironing board, however, are not unpleasant. Those were the days of radio, and while we ironed Mama and I listened to baseball games. Baseball and ironing will be forever linked in my memory. At first, it was only Mama who loved baseball, but before long, I was hooked too.

Back then, it was the New York Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers. How we hated those damn Yankees! How we loved the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson. We were as proud of him as if we knew him.

I remember the Dodgers winning the pennant in 1953, and knew they had won pennants before that. But they could never seem to beat those Yankees when it came to the important stuff. The Dodgers were called the “Boys of Summer” and their slogan was “Wait ’till next year.”

The Dodgers had a left-handed pitcher named Johnny Podres. He was a super pitcher whose pitches were called “pulling down the lampshade.” I can’t remember where the phrase came from, but I remember how funny I thought it sounded. I don’t remember all their names, but I do remember when they finally won the World Series in 1955. I remember when Pee Wee Reese caught a fly that had been hit by Yogi Berra because I knocked over the ironing board. Mama and I breathlessly listened to every game of that 1955 World Series while we took turns ironing on the hot October afternoons.

The Dodgers won again in 1959, but as I grew older, my interest in baseball waned. Boys were more interesting than baseball.

After we moved to Maine in 1975, Mama’s hatred of the Yankees continued and grew into a passion for Boston’s Red Sox, their new arch rival after the Dodgers moved to the West Coast. I doubt that in all those years, Mama ever missed listening to a game.

Every summer, her TV was tuned to the Red Sox games. In later years, after her vision faded, she turned again to radio, plugging into her Walkman and closing her eyes to hear the Red Sox lose the pennant year after year, a saga even worse than the Dodgers’ luck. She and Donnie would go at it about the games.

Whenever the Red Sox would get ahead in the standings, Donnie would say, “They’ll fade in the end, just like always. They can’t stand the pressure.”

Yadda, yadda, yadda. And they would get into it good-naturedly. Once she said, “Baseball is better over the radio, but I sure don’t miss that ironing.”

This year’s baseball season is now history, of course, but the thrill of Boston’s win lingers. And because of some television idiocy that prevented us from watching the games on TV, Donnie and I once again tuned into a heart-stopping playoff series and then the World Series on the radio, somehow managing to stay awake until the very last pitch of the very last inning.

Donnie and I listened. Mama didn’t have the opportunity to know that her beloved Red Sox finally won. She died in late August before the playoff games began.

My thrill in the Red Sox’s long-fought victory was tempered by sadness that Mama hadn’t been able to wait to see what she’d hoped for over so many years.

I’m not sure, however, that she didn’t get to see the game. Part of me believes that she watched it along with the rest of us. I’d like to think so, anyway.

Still, I would have liked to have shared that victory with her, to have seen that grin spread across her face and see her eyebrows twitch as she realized that at last she was going to have the last word with Donnie.

Hopefully, she heard him say: “Well, Gram’s Red Sox finally made it. I hope she’s watching.”

Jeanette Baldridge is a writer and teacher who lives in West Pari. She may be reached by e-mail at [email protected].