How About a Used Bathing Suit?

There's this thing someone invented a while back called laundry. You see, you take your clothing (could be a bathing suit or anything really) and you wash it really good with soap and water.

It's funny someone else brought this up. I tried to get out of my mother, who is in her 80s, if you could sell or rent a used bathing suit in the '40s, and all I could get was about the "built-in underwear" out of her. When I asked if a woman would have worn her own underwear under a long-shorts style Mildred wore, she said no.

I haven't checked out bathing suits in years, but don't the new ones have something over the crotch area so a customer can try a suit out and still have it be suitable for sale to another woman?

I grew up with a pool, and it was considered the role of a good host to have clean, extra suits available in case a guest decided to take a dip.

Remember the same thing showed up in The Philadelphia Story, where Katherine Hepburn offered a spare suit to James Stewart.

It does make my skin crawl a bit.

If I recall correctly, in the teens and 20s, swim suits could be rented at the big municipal pools or at the beach.

I don't know what people do now, but when I was a kid in the '50s and '60s, anybody who had a pool in their back yard kept a few spare men's swim trunks and women's bathing suits on hand for guests who hadn't come prepared to swim. Also, the public plunge used to rent them for a quarter. Washing machines and laundry detergent had been invented by then, so it wasn't considered a big deal.