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.