Blog 3360 – 01.14.2025

The Importance of Proper Ironing Board

If you are one of those people who helped turn what was once called Casual Friday or Jeans Day into the daily dress code at your work place or are particularly fond of what was once called grunge-wear you are probably not going to like the opinion that I express today.

I miss people dressing up for work, dressing up to go to church, or to dinner or a movie. I believe that the root cause of the fall of the Roman Empire and every empire since can be traced to slipping attire standards, people dressing down and no longer dressing up. Time was when even poor people put on their “Sunday best” to go to town and found as many excuses to dress up as they could. Not so long ago classy restaurants did not have to require gentlemen to wear a coat and tie for it was just understood that if you went out for dinner you dressed up. Maybe the real reason church attendance has fallen off is not a lack of faith in God, but than anything not important enough to dress up for just does not seem all that important anymore.

My mother made sure that the pants and shirts that my brother and I wore to school were always clean and pressed. She taught us how to take care of ourselves: How to cook, how to wash dishes, how to make our beds, and how to wash and iron our own clothes. She never let us do any of those things while we were in her home, yet she made sure that before we went out on our own that we had mastered those skills.

I recall once in the nineteen-eighties when mom and dad drove from Tennessee out to Texas for a visit that mom was very disappointed to see me wearing a wrinkled shirt and let me know in no uncertain terms that even if my wife did not care enough about my appearance to iron my shirts that I should take enough pride in my own appearance to do it myself. She also reminded me that even wash and wear shirts and pants, to look their best, require a good pressing. If you do not overload the clothes dryer and take things out quickly and hang them right away or fold them neatly, you can avoid a lot of heavy ironing, still pressing with a little steam keeps shirts and pants wrinkle free with sharp creases.

The U.S. Army that I was a member of some fifty-five years ago required that even our work clothes (fatigues) be laundered with heavy starch. As soldiers we were required to “break starch” on Monday mornings, and as often throughout the week as necessary to maintain a sharp appearance. Breaking starch meant you had to carefully separate the sleeves of your fatigue shirts and fatigue pants legs by slipping your hand between them to break apart the heavy starched, stiff as a board, and stuck together fabric.

To iron properly, in addition to a good steam iron, you need a proper ironing board. For any job to be done and done well not only are skills required, but also the proper tools.

The clothes may not “make” the person but they give a good indication of what the person thinks of themselves. In order to put our best foot forward it helps if that foot is extended from a pant leg with a sharp and crisp crease.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White