The Charming, Eccentric, Blessed Life of Lee Maxwell

This is how it ends: an old country home with an old country woman resting in a recliner in her family room. Her head lies atop a small pillow; a colorful blanket covers her tiny body.

Barbara Maxwell is 91 years old, the wife of a former college professor, a mother of four, a grandmother of 10, a great-grandmother of 10. Her eyes are closed, her bony hands are clasped on her abdomen, and her head is tilted slightly, as if she’s straining to hear a distant voice. Her chest rises and falls, almost imperceptibly. A hospice nurse checks her vitals. “It’s unfortunately her time to go,” the man says.

Judy Olsen is in a chair near her mother’s feet, which are propped up on the recliner’s footrest. Judy is 67 and operates the family’s greenhouse nursery, a few dozen yards up the road that runs in front of the Maxwells’ house on the outskirts of Eaton, in Weld County. Judy reaches her hand toward the blanket.

“She told us yesterday she wanted to go,” Judy tells the nurse.

“I think yesterday was a different day for all of us,” Judy’s brother Mike Maxwell says. “She was very open and honest.”

“She told me she loved me,” Judy says.

“We got to say what needed to be said,” Mike says.

The nurse listens and nods. His voice is calming—reassuring, but honest. “This is the stage where we just keep her comfortable,” he says. “I can say pretty confidently she’s not in pain. OK?”

Mike clears his throat, then turns to his father. “Got anything else, Dad?”

Barbara’s husband for the past 71 years, 11 months, and seven days is sitting quietly at the kitchen table. Lee Maxwell glances down, then turns to look at his wife. A grandfather clock ticks away in a corner of the small room. “No,” Lee says finally. “Nothing else.”

The nurse stands, faces Lee, and tells him to take care of himself. Lee pushes himself out of his chair and shakes the nurse’s hand. He walks across the wooden floor, past the clock, past the bedroom, past the framed photos lining the shelves and walls. He reaches his office near the front door, where books and papers are stacked on shelves and scattered about his desk—where I’m watching his wife’s final hours on a tiny, closed-circuit video screen next to Lee’s computer.

He pokes his head inside the doorway. “I need a walk,” Lee says. Moments later, he opens the front door, steps into the cool March air, and disappears.

For years, Lee had been something of an enigma in town—Doc Brown without the DeLorean. Over the course of four decades, the retired electrical engineering professor built a collection of antique washing machines, which now number more than 1,500 and earned him a Guinness world record. Lee’s collection, known officially as Lee Maxwell’s Washing Machine Museum, holds objects that span around 200 years of mechanical innovation: wood, steel, copper, and brass appliances, all of which he stores in a pair of massive warehouses on his property.

He was an expert in the esoteric. Not only did he have the most comprehensive collection of washing machines on the planet, but Lee also collected antique mop wringers, irons, and vacuum stomps. He’d built the menagerie, he says, because he was intrigued by the washers’ mechanics and, over time, became interested in their histories as well. The assemblage was also, he thought, just really, really cool. A steady flow of visitors—up to 700 a year—from around the world would pass through the warehouses and marvel at his pieces, which include an 1885 Guffins Steam Washing Machine, something called a Torpedo Washer, and antique Whirlpools. CBS’ Sunday Morning program profiled Lee in 2018. The “spin doctor,” Jane Pauley had called him.

The washing machines came from auctions and estate sales and junkyards and dilapidated barns in all 50 states, plus locations across Europe and Australia. He’d photographed each one and documented them at oldewash.com, a website his son Mike designed and maintains. In addition to serving as a repository for information on washing machines, the site includes hundreds of washing machine patents and dozens of washing-machine-related articles Lee’s penned over the years.

Lee began collecting in 1985—the same year he retired from his job at Colorado State University, where he had taught for more than 20 years. As the decades passed, washing machines materialized on his property. Neighbors and strangers who’d heard the legend of Lee Maxwell’s collection would simply roll up in pickups to drop off another rusted discovery.

One day this past December, I drove past an old washing machine sitting at the end of Lee’s gravel driveway and parked outside his house, a stately, late-19th-century white-brick structure. The property stretches 17 acres, with a large pond on the west side, and encompasses the Eaton Grove Nursery as well as a separate house for Judy. (Mike lives on an adjacent plot of land.) Two peacocks lounge atop Lee’s workshop, and several more skitter across the drive. An old water tower constructed of wood rises over the surrounding dirt fields. A sign near the door reads, “Lee Maxwell Collector of Old and Unusual.”

Splintered wooden siding covers the exterior of Lee’s workshop. I knock on the door, and he answers in a pair of worn brown overalls. He’s wearing a tattered jacket. His thick white hair stands up on the top of his head. Flames crackle in the potbelly fireplace near the doorway. Handmade wooden gears and slats cover a workbench. Along two walls are drawers with labels for things like “wringer spring bars,” “lid hinges,” “top wing bolts,” “agitator crowns,” and something called “TITS.” (I don’t ask.) A large monitor displays an image of his website. Another tab is open to an eBay search for antique clothing irons. “You always have to be on the lookout,” he says.

Mike eventually stops by, and the two take me on a brief tour of the warehouses, which don’t have heaters and are bitterly cold. Lee walks through the warren of mechanical oddities while Mike watches his father’s footsteps, ready to catch him if he stumbles. “Watch yourself, Dad,” Mike calls out every few minutes.

I check out the wooden tub Clarinda Dolly washer from 1917 and a Bendix washer, the first mass-produced rotating-drum washer from 1937. I pop open the door on a white Maytag Model SE1000, the company’s first stacked washer and dryer, released in 1987. “Sometimes, I wonder why anyone but me cares about this,” Lee says. I can’t tell if he’s being modest or if he’s asking an existential question about what his massive collection means. The temperature has fallen below freezing in one of the warehouses, and Mike interrupts us. “We can’t have you getting a cold,” he tells his father. “I’m not ready to deal with that.” Lee agrees. He turns off the lights and shuts the door behind him.

Barbara, Lee, and Mike are chatting in the house on Valentine’s Day when Lee starts telling the story of how he had wanted to propose to Barbara on this day in 1952, but he’d left the engagement ring at his parents’ house. It had snowed in Alliance, Nebraska, he says, where they both lived. “I didn’t want to have to walk the mile there and back.” Though Barbara has probably heard the story dozens of times, she smiles at her husband as if this were the first telling.

Lee proposed the next night in front of Barbara’s parents’ house. When Barbara said yes, the pair ran inside to wake her parents. “I saved so much money by waiting,” Lee says and then grins at his wife. “Imagine all the extra money I would’ve spent on anniversary flowers on Valentine’s Day.” Barbara laughs and reaches out to touch her husband’s hand.

Now in their 90s, Lee and Barbara are part of a rare club: They are nonagenarians, a word derived from the Latin nonagenarius, which means “containing ninety.” A 2018 study in the journal International Psychogeriatrics concluded that, among a small sample size, “exceptional longevity was characterized by a balance between acceptance of and grit to overcome adversities, along with a positive attitude and close ties to family, religion, and land, providing purpose in life.”

Although Lee and Barbara aren’t religious, they seem to possess all the other traits in the report. Two of their children live nearby. Barbara reads voraciously—newspapers and mysteries, mostly. At 5 p.m. every weekday, she turns the channel to BBC News and hosts happy hour, which these days includes popcorn and bottled water. Lee works on brainteaser puzzles, on washing machine research, and on scale wooden washing machine models he creates from his collection of patents.

The National Bureau of Economic Research reported in 2019 that just three percent of American couples survive into their 90s. Lee and Barbara had buried parents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters. In fall 2023, the couple’s eight-year-old great-granddaughter died from neuroblastoma. And yet they had survived.

It seemed as if everything in Lee’s life had an origin story with Barbara. In 1951, he was home from the Navy when he saw her at a bank teller’s desk. They married in 1952. In 1955, she encouraged him to leave the oil industry in Oklahoma to pursue a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Oklahoma. She supported his first teaching job, as an associate professor at the University of Idaho, then backed the move to Fort Collins and CSU. When the house in Eaton came up for sale in 1974, Lee, Barbara, and the kids drove the 20 miles from their home in town, past the farms and the fields to see it. When they opened the front door to the old brick house, Barbara turned to her husband. “Don’t dawdle,” she said. “Get this house.”

Even Lee’s washing machine collection began with his wife. As he often tells the story, the couple bought an RV when Lee retired in 1985, and they planned a road trip from Colorado to Maine. Somewhere in Iowa, they stopped at a farmer’s estate sale. There, among the implements and tools, Lee spied a 1907 Maytag Model 44. He loved the machine’s beauty and the mechanics of it. Over time, he began to love the idea that these machines changed women’s roles at home. Barbara didn’t object when Lee paid $100 for the contraption and loaded it into their ride. She didn’t complain much, either, when he kept stopping and buying up antique washers. “We bought 12 more all the way to Maine,” Lee says. “We came home with a mobile home and a new trailer filled with washing machines.”

As they grew older, Barbara and Lee seemed unincumbered by the worries that came with aging. Lee even refused to use the word “old,” often referring to Barbara and himself as “grown up.” He wrote regular letters to his 10 grandchildren, updating them on his washing machine additions, his latest research, and his life with “Bun,” his nickname for Barbara. “Your grandma believes if you study and learn more that you will be happier,” he once wrote the grandkids. “Do you think that way too? How will you know if you don’t try it?”

Lee was in relatively good health, considering his high-mileage body. Barbara took multiple daily walks around the property, logging more than a mile each day. She visited the nursery. At night, Barbara and Lee would sit in their family room chairs and put on a movie. Lee liked Clint Eastwood. Barbara preferred Charles Bronson. Once they had both started sleeping downstairs, they would tuck themselves into their twin beds, which were on opposite walls of a converted room just off the main hallway. A needlepoint hung over Barbara’s bed: “Home Is Where The Heart Is.”

In September 2023, Barbara was admitted to the hospital in Greeley with swelling in her legs and was diagnosed with extremely low sodium levels. The prognosis was bleak. She and Lee had never been afraid to discuss mortality. Barbara didn’t want a funeral. Her newspaper death notice would be brief. “Barbara Maxwell of Eaton,” it would read. “Private family services will be held.” She’d be cremated, and her remains would be placed in a wooden receptacle. Her ashes, at some point, would be spread at the pond and in her favorite hiking spots around Fort Collins.

After Barbara was released from the hospital, Lee bought a pair of overstuffed brown recliners, and Judy situated them across from the flat-screen TV that’s next to the fireplace. At night, Barbara struggled to sleep in her bed. “She moved onto the recliner,” Lee says, “and that was it.”

By late winter,  Judy and Mike had updated their two siblings, who live outside of Colorado, on the situation. When Lee needed a break, Judy would come over and play Pavarotti—her mother’s favorite—on the stereo. Mike would hold his mom’s hand.

Lee stopped going to his workshop. He worried he would miss Barbara’s final moment. Lee installed a video monitor in the family room and placed a miniature video screen in his office, where he was reworking an old article on the history of PastTime washing machines.

Judy often stayed at the house at night so her father could rest. She brushed her mother’s hair; she adjusted the colorful blanket covering her. She sat next to her mother and just watched. One night, near the end, Judy heard her father stirring, then the sound of two feet hitting the wooden floor. Judy pretended to sleep as Lee came into the room. Barbara opened her eyes for a moment and met her husband’s gaze. There, in the dark, they smiled at each other before Barbara fell asleep again.

A week after Barbara’s death in late March of this year, her remains rest in a wooden box near the living room fireplace. Photos of her are on the kitchen table. In one, Barbara’s thin arms rise above her head, in a victorious pose. “I don’t think we could have wanted an ending better than the one we got,” Lee says.

Lee is sitting at the kitchen table, the one he and Barbara had picked up from the side of the road in the early ’60s, when they were young and still building a family in Idaho. Barbara had been in charge of decorating over the past 50 years and put her touch on virtually everything in the room. Her ceramic roosters rest atop the kitchen cabinets, above the stovetop backsplash decorated with a mishmash of painted tiles—a brown goat with a crescent moon in the background, a peach, a trio of poinsettias, a majestic blue-and-green peacock—collected from their travels.

Every week for decades, Lee bought Barbara a bouquet of flowers and put them in a vase in the kitchen. A few days after Barbara died, Lee picked up a dozen yellow roses from Walmart. He filled a glass vase with water and placed it in the kitchen. He now goes to Walmart alone to get his groceries. Although Judy and Mike live nearby, he is determined to do his own shopping, to make his own food, to clean his own clothes. Barbara had always done most of the household chores, including doing the wash. One day, not long after Barbara’s death, Lee had to ask Judy how to use the washing machine. The irony wasn’t lost on his daughter. “The man with the largest collection in the world,” she says, “can’t do his own laundry.”

Judy showed her father the basics: Don’t mix colors with whites. This is where you put the detergent. Don’t overstuff the washer. She gave him detailed instructions, which he wrote down on a piece of paper and set atop the dryer:

• EMPTY POCKETS
• Wash start
• 2 T-spoons in drawer
• Dial to speed wash
• Temp to warm
• Spin to high
• Soil to normal
• Push start
• EMPTY POCKETS

“I’m figuring things out,” Lee says a few days later and holds up a pair of his jeans.

He’d forgotten to empty his pockets and a cough drop melted in one. “Still learning,” he says. “Won’t happen again.”

Lee is working through a puzzle one afternoon this past spring and talking to me about his work on an article about a washing machine he wants to put on his website before the summer. “I’ve got a deadline, and I’m not missing it,” he says. “You have to have something to look forward to, right?”

Lee, however, isn’t looking forward to a different chore on his to-do list. He says Mike wants him to go through his house and take inventory of what he still needs and what can go. “Clean out cupboards and stuff,” Lee says. “I’m not going to do that.” This was his home, his life, and he’d do what he wanted. Barbara’s wooden signs—“The Simple Life” and “Wine Gets Better With Age”—still hang from the kitchen walls. Her books are on tables and chairs. Her blouses and pants and shoes remain untouched in the bedroom, which is made up just the way she had it before she’d moved to the recliner. Her photographs rest in a glass cabinet and atop the piano Barbara and Lee bought 60 years ago. Her denim jacket dangles from a door near the TV, as if ready for a springtime walk to the pond. “If that wasn’t hanging there, it would be empty,” Lee says. “It’s already empty enough.”

As he’s talking, his cell phone rings. Lee picks up. It’s one of his friends. “Howya doing, Lee?” the voice says. “I was just checking in.”

“You know…,” Lee says, drawing out he words. “I’m extra splenditious in a tangential way right now.”

The voice on the other end pauses, then says, “Have you gotten any new machines?”

“Not really,” Lee says.

The two talk for a little bit, and then the friend says, “Lee, you said you’re extra splenditious but in a tangential way. Why’s that?”

Lee’s eyes go soft. “Oh,” he says. “You don’t know?” He looks at the ceiling. “Barbara passed away.”

“Oh, Lee,” the voice says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t. I’m so, so sorry.”

The call is brief, uncomfortable. At some point, it’s unclear who is comforting whom. “She was beautiful and wonderful,” Lee finally says. “I lived every day like I was the luckiest person.”

Lee pulls out a golf cart one day this past spring and drives around the pond on the property. Geese had flown in and were taking over the area; Lee stops every 50 or so yards to see if he can spy an egg.

He drives the cart along the water’s edge, passing a rusted tractor he’d gotten from an estate sale decades ago. He passes the back end of the nursery, where employees are unloading trees. Then he heads back home and after parking the cart, wanders to his workshop. For as long as he can remember, this has been his oasis, the place where he can shut out the rest of the world and concentrate. Today, it feels more like a refuge, a bunker against the realities outside the door.

He fiddles with a scale model of an 1865 washing machine, which had been developed by a man named Mason Pike, of North Leverett, Massachusetts. Lee’s wooden model is around two feet long, with hand-sawed gears the size of fists and a wooden arm that pumps up and down. Lee adjusts his bifocals and looks at the pieces of wood scattered atop his workbench. “Lemme see here,” he says.

He presses a thin, wooden slat against his model and scrunches his nose. He studies the rest of the model and realizes he made a mistake. He put a wooden arm in the wrong position. “Will you look at that?” he says. Another person might be upset by the discovery, but Lee’s energized, excited to have a problem he can fix.

A little before noon, Lee heads back to the house. His eldest granddaughter, who is in town from California to help her mother around the nursery, shows up at the door and lets herself in.

“Hey, Grandpa,” Brandy Shakibai, 41, says. “What’re you up to today?”

“You know,” Lee says.

Brandy had helped Lee pick out an air fryer, another step in Lee’s independence. Lee had come to treat the fryer like a culinary miracle. “You just put the food in and you don’t have to worry about it,” he marveled. Brandy showed him how to adjust the settings, how Lee’s Brussels sprouts could cook in just five minutes.

“The perfect char,” Lee says. “Thank you for that.”

“Anything for you,” Brandy says.

Brandy tells her grandfather how she loves her visits home, how she finds a bit of Zen watering plants over at the nursery. She says she feels close to her grandmother when she’s working with the greenery. Judy, who’s also at the house, says she remembers her mother at the nursery, hanging out, sitting and chatting with customers. Lee tells the story of how he saw 19-year-old Barbara at the bank in Nebraska, how his previous girlfriend had written him a Dear John letter and he’d found himself ready for a new relationship. “Grandma’s best friend took her boyfriend away from her!” Lee says. “Lucky for me.”

Brandy and Judy laugh. “Grandma said you guys talked for 45 minutes,” Brandy says. “You asked her out, and she said, ‘No. I’m not that kind of girl.’ ”

Lee feigns innocence and tells the two that he and Barbara wrote each other nearly every week for the six months while he served the rest of his time in the Navy. “I was going to ask about that,” Brandy says. Lee says he thinks Barbara saved the letters. Judy brightens. “I would love to see those,” she says. “Do you mind if we….” She catches herself as the words come out, as if she’s worried she might upset her father. “Sometime?” Judy finally says.

“Yeah,” Lee says. “Sometime.”

Lee gets behind the wheel of his Chevrolet Equinox one morning this past spring and heads a few miles to the Eaton Recreation Center for his first workout since Barbara’s death. He backs into a parking space at the rec center and steps out of his SUV in his New Balance sneakers. He walks to the wall of glass doors and goes inside. A sandwich board sign posted near the front desk has a picture of a turtle and a finish line drawn in red and green dry-erase marker above a message that reads: “Slow progress is better than no progress. Stay positive, and don’t give up.” Lee shows his identification card at the front desk and heads upstairs.

It’s barely past 7:30 a.m., but several men and women are already lifting weights and running on the treadmills. Lee lowers himself onto a stationary bicycle near an overhead bank of   TVs and starts to warm up. He runs a hand over one of his surgically repaired knees. “Gotta get loose,” Lee says. After a few minutes, he moves to the indoor track, which has a view of the swimming pool below.

He takes an outside lane and walks a couple of laps around the track while people less than half his age pass him. He thinks about his old job at CSU, how he and Barbara used to host parties for the graduate students he mentored. Lee was in his 30s then, and some of those men hadn’t been much younger than him. He remembers their names, all of them, and starts ticking them off in his head. His mouth hangs open a moment, as if he’s working out a problem. “Nearly every one of them is gone,” he says. He rests an arm on a rack of weights, looks at the ceiling, and goes through the list one more time. Like any good engineer, he double-checks his figures. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. “Gone.”

He moves back to a bicycle, then to a treadmill. A young woman is moving at a good clip next to him. Lee pushes the plus button a few times. “It’s nice to be back here,” he says. “I needed this.” Besides dealing with the loss of his wife, Lee has worried lately that he is losing something of himself, physically. He’d fallen in his kitchen a couple of months ago and banged his head on the counter. He escaped with a small cut on his forehead, but the incident was a not-so-subtle reminder that he was no longer as agile as he once had been. He had a new pair of sneakers, with a wider sole, to support him. A cane rested against the desk in his office back home. He’d bought several Amazon Alexa devices and placed them around the house, within earshot, in case he took another spill.

Months earlier, Lee, Mike, and I sat around a table near the fireplace in the workshop and talked about the museum, about Lee’s advancing age, and about what Mike might eventually do with the washing machines, if his father couldn’t find someone to take them. “What do you do with hundreds and hundreds of washing machines?” Mike asked. Even the words sound ridiculous. Mike certainly doesn’t want the washers, and—it seems—neither does anyone else. Lee has always wanted to donate his collection to a museum, but five years of searching produced no takers, largely because he was only willing to donate the collection as a whole, not piecemeal.

“It’d be expensive to house them, I know,” Lee said. “Maybe it’s unrealistic.”

Mike and I danced around the idea that someday Lee wouldn’t be around. Lee was giving fewer museum tours because of his age, and much of that work had fallen to Mike, a retired IT technician, who dutifully helped his father. Mike knew the task of dealing with all this stuff would eventually land in his lap. “It’s something I think about,” Mike admitted. “What happens when….” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t want to lose his dad, and he had no idea what he’d do with the collection when he did.

After his workout at the gym, Lee walks downstairs and pours himself a cup of black coffee. He sits at a table overlooking the building’s entrance. People flit in and out, and Lee smiles at the thought that this spot had been part of a massive field just a decade earlier.

There are too many old-timers who are afraid of change like this, he says, people who fight against everything, who want things to stay just as they always were. “They can’t accept that things evolve,” Lee says. There’s a neighbor of his, he says, who rails against any new thing. The paving of country roads, newly constructed homes, the shiny strip malls and unfamiliar neighbors and increasing traffic. “I can’t live like that,” he says.

He and Barbara used to go to a bar in town that had been there when they moved to Eaton. A couple of years ago, they started going to a new Mexican restaurant next to a new gas station in a new part of a residential community. “We evolved,” he says. “You can either be afraid of change, or you can embrace it. The world doesn’t care which one you pick. But I do.”

On the way back from his workout, Lee makes a few turns in his Equinox, then breezes up a long, unbroken stretch of blacktop. Open fields pass on each side of the SUV, marked every couple hundred yards with another farmhouse. Lee makes another turn, then reaches the old washing machine at the top of his short driveway. He makes a three-point turn, pushes the garage door opener, and slowly backs in.

There’s a big wooden crate at one end of the garage; along the back wall, there are several gleaming antique washers, Maytags mostly, three-deep. They once belonged to a guy who ran an appliance store in Lafayette. His wife dropped off the washers after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. “He’s got it pretty bad now,” Lee says.

A peacock perches on the roof of the garage above Lee’s head and lets out a sharp caw. Lee looks at the willows and maples that line the gravel path to his workshop. Soon, the trees will be turning green with life. “Things will be changing around here,” he says. “And it’ll be beautiful.”

In a few weeks, Lee will be deep into his next wooden washing machine model. He’ll measure and saw and sand and build. EBay packages will arrive at his kitchen door nearly every day. Judy and Mike and some of the grandkids and great-grandkids will stop by. Judy will find him a goldendoodle puppy. He’ll name it Gravel Gertie, after a character in the Dick Tracy comics. He’ll call her GG, for short.

He’ll watch Charles Bronson on the big TV in his family room. Lee will write more letters to his grandkids. “I no longer have a proofreader for these monthly missives so please excuse the mistakes,” he’ll write. He’ll finally finish his article on the history of the PastTime washer. “My paper won’t be a bestseller,” he’ll joke.

He’ll also do his laundry. This time, though, Lee will empty his pockets.