In the obituary, Sam Roberts informs us that Dr. Sung explained why the Chinese immigrant came to own so many laundries in major cities like New York. You do have to be of a certain age to recall signs like the above that were ubiquitous in Manhattan, especially when I was growing up there in the '50s and '60s. In fact, I worked in one.
Mr. Roberts repeats Ms. Sung's explanation about Chinese immigration. She herself was born in China, came to the United States, went back to China when he father couldn't make ends meet in the '30s in the States, then came back over with her sister and brother, not content to enter into an arranged marriage.
"Laundries did not require much knowledge of the English language. A bar of soap and a scrub board, they were in business. They were masters of their own destiny, and if they worked hard and earned their own living, then they didn't have to fear for layoffs and discrimination."
I love telling the story of how I swapped roles with George Lew whose father owned the Ying Kee Laundry at about 210 East 18th Street with myself, whose father owned the Royal Flower Shop at 206 Third Avenue, NW corner of 18th Street, a family business that in 50 years was located at three locations in the area, never more than a block apart.
It almost sounds like I fabricated a tale of hitching a ride on a tramp streamer and sailed to Shanghai, but working at the laundry was true.
George's father, Lew Bong often needed someone to deliver laundry packages to customers who arranged for delivery. It was all local stuff. I also picked up laundry and brought the favored customers' laundry back to the store.
My favorite pickup was from the Old Town Bar (still there) on 18th Street just west of Park Avenue South. I'd go upstairs and deliver the brown wrapped package to a group of people who were sitting at a booth, playing cards in the afternoon, generally already a bit tipsy. I got my best tips from these people.
I guess I was a little older than Lew's son, because George wasn't doing these errands. Eventually he was. We were friends. He went to Seward Park High School; I went to Stuyvesant. George must have had polio, since he walked with a pretty good limp. His mother must have passed away. He and his father lived in the back of the store.
I don't really know how it morphed into my working at the laundry on Saturdays but I must have had the bright idea that George could do the deliveries at the flower shop on Saturday, and I'd help his father. That way, we'd each get paid and wouldn't be stiffed by our own fathers who expected their sons to work for nothing. Working for nothing never appealed to me.
Although Chinese laundry signs would proclaim "Hand Washing" that wasn't the case in the '60s. All the work was sent out. They did ironing. When I worked for Lew Bong on Saturdays I manned the front of the store behind a wire cage. Lew trusted me with the money, which I was always proud of, because I never stole a dime.
I'd take customer's laundry in, usually shirts , sheets and pillow cases, check for the laundry mark, give the customer their portion of a pastel ticket with a number, something like L8654.
All laundry had a laundry mark. That was the only way when it came back from the main laundries in Chinatown the items could be matched back to the ticket. Growing up in Flushing there was a Chinese laundry three blocks from our house where my mother brought my father's shirts. Our laundry mark was FA.
I always liked it when we picked up the laundry, wrapped in a brown paper with thin string with the ticket number showing forward. The owner scanned the shelves for the matching number, and gave my mother the shirts, which were wrapped with a paper band with paper stuffed in the folds. The shirts were returned as if they were bought at the men's store, never on a hanger.
It was fun seeing if I could find the bundle on the shelves before the owner did. There was no order to how they were stacked.
I always remember they were some kind of iron machinery just inside the door. My mother said that was once used to process the collars when men's shirts required a separate collar to be fitted. The very old days.
At Lew's place as I took the shirts in I always noticed a lot of Brooks Brothers shirts—generally always white, and always with the collar buttoned down with those two small button.s Brooks Brothers I learned much later in life was proud that they invented the button down collar. I always had to unbutton the collars so the shirt would wash evenly. To this day when I unbutton my own shirt collars before my wife takes them to the dry cleaner I can't help but think of the my Saturdays at Lew's laundry.
In the '60s men's shirts were nearly always white. There was no such thing as a colored shirt. In the '60s in high school we had a French teacher who wore a pink shirt in class. We always figured he was gay.
Blue shirts eventually took hold in men's fashion when there was more color TV. The newsmen's shirts that were white looked gray on color TV. The producers introduced blue shirts to get a better image broadcasted. Eventually, there were blue and white shirts. That's about as daring as it ever got in the '60s. Unless of course you were the French teacher and probably lived in the Village.
I spent a full day at Lew's laundry on those Saturdays. We'd finish up about 8 P.M. with all the laundry bundled into huge sacks to be picked up by the trucks for the bigger Chinatown laundries downtown. I don't remember what Lew paid me, but I made money, and his son made money from my father delivering flowers.
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