Photograph courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society
Editor's note: This story first appeared in our 2020 Private School Handbook.
Sixteen years before this photo was taken in Doris Martin’s fourth-grade classroom, Lafayette Elementary said goodbye to “Miss Wash,” the last of St. Louis’ school shower ladies. Florence Walsh took the job despite warnings from her doctor. “He told me the dampness would give me rheumatism, and I think he was right,” she told a reporter in 1976 when she retired. She was 70—born the same year schools enacted compulsory showers because so many kids lived in unplumbed tenements. As a young woman, Walsh ran a tavern with her husband. When he died, a patron found her a job cleaning Pestalozzi School. “You had to be a widow,” she explained. (She quit; the head custodian kept making passes at her.) Then, in the 1950s—when every other school closed its showers—she became Lafayette’s hygiene boss, handing every kid, whether bathed or “smelling out loud,” a bleached white towel and pointing to one of the private oak-doored, marble-clad stalls. “Now what are you going to do when Miss Wash is gone?” she asked a kid on one of her last days on the job. At the end of the row of stalls, over the din of rushing water, another kid squeaked: “I’m going to cry!”
