© Frank H. Jump
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RIP: Olive Riley – Reckitt's Blue Reference from The World's Oldest Blogger's Last Posting Before Her Death
© Frank H. Jump
Kevin Walsh (Forgotten-NY) just forwarded me a message from Dawn Eden (formerly from NY Daily News) about the death of an Australian woman, who apparently was deemed the “world’s oldest blogger” by conservative blogger Duane Lester (All American Blogger). In Lester’s posting, he included the last posting from Olive Riley’s Blog. Here’s an excerpt:
In a post titled “Washing Day,” Riley wrote: “You 21st Century people live a different life than the one I lived as a youngster in the early 1900s. Take washing day, for instance. These days you just toss your dirty clothes into a washing machine, press a few switches, and it’s done.”
She then described how she helped do laundry as a youngster, starting with finding “a few pieces of wood to fire the copper for Mum.”
“When the water in the copper began to boil, Mum would add a cupful of soap chips, and throw in a cube of Reckitt’s Blue wrapped in a muslin bag to whiten the clothes,” she wrote. “Then she put in all the dirty clothes, first rubbing out the stains with a bar of Sunlight soap. … that was jolly hard work.”
Olive died last Saturday at a nursing home in New South Wales at age 108.
Thank YOU Kevin Walsh!
Jump & Walsh holding NY Daily News spread on which they collaborated.
Vincenzo and I are traveling abroad, currently driving through Piedmont, Italy, The Alps & Provence France & Barcelona, Sitges, and The Costa Brava of Spain – shooting fading ads and other ephemera. I’ve been posting from here sporadically in between a month’s worth of scheduled postings of Brooklyn, NYC & Queens. I’ve noticed an incredible amount of traffic on my site from Kevin Walsh’s Forgotten-NY and was surprised and honored to see the generous and heartfelt posting on his site about when we first met.
Ten years surely goes by quickly, yet it has been ten years filled with meaningful and formative collaborations. Kevin’s site continues to inspire and direct the course of urban archaeology. I’m grateful to have met him at the time I started the Fading Ad Campaign in 1997- knowing that I wasn’t the only crazy person interested in the documentation of urban ephemera and the passing of time.
