Friday 15 February 2013

Laundry for the Elderly, GAA 1975, soccer 1936 and rats in the trenches


I found an account of the girls' involvement with the newly set up laundry for the elderly in the 1988 yearbook. Good to relate that this service is still going strong, even though the young girls no longer help out since it moved to its new location in The Family Resource Centre.




Listowel laundry service for the elderly (the early years)

The building that houses Listowel's laundry service for the elderly is neither pretentious nor imposing. Yet, for a large section of Listowel's elderly, it provides an invaluable service.

The service runs on a quite simple but efficient system. A member of the voluntary group, with the use of a car, visits the homes of the laundry's customers to collect and deliver the laundry. The organisation caters mostly for the aged living alone who find themselves unable to deal with heavy house work such as washing clothes.

The laundry room itself contains four  washing machines, a spin dryer and three tumble dryers and a large hot press, It is operated by an able-bodied group of volunteers recruited mainly from the secondary school, and from local obliging housewives. Working on a regular rota each group is responsible for the laundering, packing, drying, ironing of an allotted batch of clothes. Another group take care of sorting and packing the clothing.

The board of management with Jim Stack, a local primary school teacher, as chairperson meet regularly to discuss the running costs of the laundry and its present and future service to the community in the Listowel area. The whole venture depends and succeeds admirably on the care and concern of almost a hundred volunteers.

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In my favourite charity shop I found this treasure from 1975:



I photographed a few snippets for your enjoyment.







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Mary Sobierlaski found this photo of a very interesting  old match programme.






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Rats in the trenches were a constant problem during WW1. Here is a group of German soldiers after a good session of rat catching. Will you look at the size of those rats?

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