Up until about ten years ago, I still used a clothes line. But in the Spring and Summer is it fine and leaves a beautiful fresh scent on the clothes. However frozen towels in winter are not my cup of tea.
I remember my mother saying that she would hang out the clothes early in the morning and they would freeze immediately. Then as the sun came round the clothes would thaw and hopefully dry enough to bring back indoors to finish up on the clothes rack. If they didn't, she would have to hang them out again the next morning and hope for the best.
She also tells about hanging my baby clothes on a rack that she would set up over a heat "register" that older heating systems had right in the floor. That way, because my clothes were smaller, they might actually dry on rainy or snowy days.
I still have that old clothes rack and I won't tell you how old it is. That would give away my age and as old as I am, I am still not ready to put my age on the Internet for all to see.
Also, my mother used a washer that had separate spin rollers on the top of the machine. When the clothes were washed, she would have to take them out of the machine and manually put them through the spin cycle by feeding the clothes into those rollers. When she was a young, newly married girl, she accidentally caught her long hair in the rollers and had to have my father cut her hair because she couldn't reach the off button with her hair and head caught in the rollers. They were dangerous things, but it was state of the art for their time.
