Robert Newton can’t pinpoint why, exactly, he began collecting antique washboards. He considers the question, furrows his brow.
Perhaps it’s nostalgia, perhaps it’s an interest in old-timers, he said. The washboards were unusual, and that piqued his interest.
“I grew up in the Depression and things were rough. It brought back memories in that respect,” he said in an interview in his Lebanon home.
Whatever the reason, he has more than 150 washboards, 50 of which hang from the ceiling of his garage. He used to own 200, but he is slowly whittling away at the collection.
A washboard was the mechanism by which people used to clean clothes before the introduction of washers and dryers. You filled a tub with warm water, you leaned the washboard against a side of the tub and you scrubbed clothes against the perforated, raised galvanized metal surface of the board.
Sometimes the washboard also featured rollers, through which you passed the clean clothes to wring out excess water. For decades this was how women cleaned clothes and linens, piles and piles and piles of them.
Zinc King, Top Notch, Columbus, Soap Saver and Kenmore were just some of the manufacturers pitching their product to women with two, three, four, five, six or more kids. Each washboard in Newton’s collection is a testament to hours of human labor.
“To me, it’s almost impossible to think about,” he said.
Now Newton, 85, hopes to donate his collection to the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vt.
He used to pick the washboards up at flea markets and yard sales, through the classifieds and from dealers. In the summer, when he and his late wife, Phyllis, took vacations in Maine, he was familiar with just about every yard sale along Route 1 from Kittery to Machias. More than a few washboards were acquired that way. But he stopped buying washboards five or six years ago.
Further, he said, “the bottom has dropped right out of the washboard market.” Specimens that used to go for $75 or $100 might fetch $10 now.
Recently, he set up a yard sale outside his house and put some of his washboards up for sale. “A gentleman from North Conway (N.H.) said he was a dealer, and he bought 19 smaller ones. I wasn’t going to argue with him,” Newton said. A little girl saw the washboards and asked her mother what they were.
It was through Phyllis that he began collecting washboards. After her first marriage ended and she and Newton, also ending his first marriage, became a couple, he investigated the big barn in the back of her house on Shaw Street in Lebanon.
“I got to moseying around and found six washboards in a corner,” he said. That was enough to start him on his decades-long obsession.
The Newtons married in 1969. Between them, they had five children from their first marriages. Phyllis, of French-Canadian descent, died a little more than 10 years ago. She was also a collector, of beer trays and blue-and-white Chinese ginger jars, and she crocheted and knitted.
She never once asked him to de-acquisition or get rid of any of the things he loved. Of such laissez-faire is a stable and happy marriage made.
If you come to Newton’s house to see only washboards, however, it turns out his home harbors other secrets.
Does he have other collections?
“I’m so glad you asked,” he said, brightening.
He has a ready, congenial laugh and a shock of white hair.
Newton is not a connoisseur only of the washboard. He has amassed a little bit of everything — books, snow globes, pictures.
Mostly, though, he collects model airplanes. Hundreds of them, of every vintage and description.
The majority are models of American military and commercial planes but he also has collected World War II era planes of other nations: R.A.F Spitfires, German Messerschmitts and Japanese Zeros.
They fill one room upstairs, displayed behind glass, and cram cases in his basement. He has bought models of aircraft carriers and also builds them himself in a small studio. He has a model of Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose and a model of Glamorous Glennis, the Bell X-1 jet named for the wife of Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier in 1947.
In his basement there are binders, dozens of them, which catalog the collection. They are organized by nationality: Canadian, German, American, and so on. He buys airplane Christmas ornaments to hang on his tree. He has pencil sharpeners in the shape of … you guessed it.
In his living room, he has hung in a place of honor a painting of a group of Tuskegee Airmen, who during World War II were the first African-American men to serve as military pilots in the still-segregated Armed Services. Next to it is a Pilot Flight Records and Log Book that once belonged to one of the Tuskegee pilots and an autograph from Charles McGee, one of the oldest surviving Tuskegee Airmen, which Newton picked up when he met McGee at an air show in Burlington.
Newton caught the plane bug when he was a kid, growing up near Springfield, Mass. His father used to take him to watch planes take off and land at Westover Field near Chicopee, Mass., built in 1939 in anticipation of a military build-up to war. Now called Westover Air Reserve Base, it is one of the few remaining active bases in the Northeast.
Newton’s father Emery moved his wife and five children to a farm in Enfield in 1949, partially to get away from the foundry work that gave him black lung disease.
When it turned out that it would be far too expensive to bring the farm back to mint agricultural condition, Newton’s father went into the logging business, where he was sometimes joined by Robert, the oldest son.
Too young to enlist in World War II, Robert Newton ended up joining the Navy when he was 17. He’d wanted to go into the Air Force but for numerous reasons, including tensions with his mother, he opted for quicker entry into the Navy instead.
“It was her wish,” he said.
A distant cousin was in the Navy and while she would sign a waiver to let 17-year-old Robert enlist in the Navy, she wouldn’t do so for the Air Force, which was his desire.
“She wanted me out of the house, and that was my way out. … It all worked out. I enjoyed the Navy,” he said.
He enlisted in 1951 and served for three years on the U.S.S. Monterey, stationed at the U.S. Naval Base at Pensacola, Fla. They lost on average three planes a week when they came in to land, he recalled. He remembers only one pilot fatality, but lost planes are another matter.
There are probably “hundreds of ‘em down there dumped in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said.
After his service, he returned to Lebanon and worked many years for a local grocery stores and a shoe heel manufacturer before getting a job at Split Ball Bearing (now Timken).
He retired from Split Ball Bearing 24 years ago, after a long career there as a quality assurance and control inspector. He also served in the Lebanon Civil Air Patrol, doing maintenance. Phyllis worked as a bookkeeper.
For Newton, there is no such thing as cabin fever in the winter because that is when he can devote himself to his collections, and to building and painting his models. He used to buy supplies at the hobby store in West Lebanon, but since they went out of business, he travels to Manchester to buy from a store there.
He does everything by hand and avoids modern technology when at all possible.
“I had a computer but it made me nervous, and I sold it,” Newton said.
There are exceptions, however.
In a corner of his basement stands a state-of-the-art GE washer and dryer. Nostalgia goes only so far.
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.