Bringing Home the Duncan Phyfe: Chapter 10

I mentioned that the apartment had a cast iron tub, an old stove, and a wall-mounted kitchen sink. It had no radio (though Dad would soon build one out of spare parts, no phonograph player, and no television. (In 1951, many people did not yet have televisions. That would change in the decades ahead. There are now 2.73 televisions per household. The average number of people per household is 2.55—that means TVs now outnumber the people watching them!)

More importantly, the apartment lacked two appliances that today would be considered "must have." First of all, it did not have a washing machine. Mom did small amounts of laundry in the kitchen sink with a washboard, but when she had a lot of laundry to do, she'd load up a basket and haul it over to her parents' house to use the old wringer washer in their basement.

In the 50's, washing machines as we now know them were just being introduced in advertisements, but in the years following World War II, the vast majority of homes that had a "machine" still used something like this old Maytag. It's hard to imagine something getting "clean" in that contraption. (My grandmother once got her hand stuck in the wringer part of the machine, a common hazard of the day.) You may be thinking that the other missing appliance was a clothes drier, but those were not yet popular. Most people considered them a waste of electricity compared to a clothesline. [Even after my Mom had a drier, she preferred hanging clothes on a line, weather permitting, for as long as I can remember.]
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The other missing appliance was introduced before WWII but did not go into major mass production and "must have" status until after the war. It changed human life more than we could have imagined. Mom and Dad’s apartment had no refrigerator.

The glass of milk Mom poured for Dad before unveiling her no-gravy meal had been kept cold in a wooden box on the stoop outside the apartment door. The idea worked fine in the winter, but it was early April and daytime temps were beginning to reach the fifties, which meant Dad had to buy a block of ice for his “ice box" and cover the whole thing with an old blanket.

Mom now laughs about their porch “ice box,” but at the time it didn’t strike her as strange or even nostalgic. She knew it was only temporary, and the arrangement was not far removed from their not-so-distant childhoods.

Like many children of the Great Depression Mom remembered having ice delivered each week to their old oak ice box in the kitchen. These were not bags of machine-made cubes (like the kind we buy today for picnics and parties); they were twenty-five pound blocks of ice cut from the frozen river in winter and stored in the ice house beneath a mountain of sawdust through the rest of the year. It had worked that way for centuries. No electricity required.

The ice man would drive a horse-drawn wagon (and later an old truck) down the streets looking for "ICE TODAY" signs in the front window. Mom says on hot summer days she and her friends would wait for the heavy cart, dripping from slowly melting ice, and the ice man would chip off of chunk with an ice pick, wipe off the sawdust and give it to them like a popsicle. Then he'd clamp the block with his big ice tongs and carry it with one arm up to the house and right into the kitchen ice box.

It was not until the late 30's that my mother's home saw its first electric "ice box" with the compressor on the top. As a kid visiting the same house in the 60's, they had a slightly newer model with all the round lines and chrome accents of Studebaker. Even then Grandma still called it an "ice box." She'd say things like “Here, Deary, put this left-over coleslaw in the ice box for me.” And I’d say, “Sure, Grandma. Do you mean in the fridge?” Then I would walk to their small refrigerator and open it to see it packed with fowl smelling things like Limburger cheese and countless clumps of tinfoil holding who knows what from who knows when. I remember that anything we ate from Grandma’s “ice box” had a unique osmosis flavor of everything else stashed in there.

But I digress… I say all this to say that the practice of keeping things cold with a block of ice was not primitive—it was the way Mom and Dad remembered doing it as kids. In 1951, up to 20% of the homes in Port Huron still had ice delivered to their old oak “ice box.” Or in my mom and dad’s case, a wooden box outside their apartment door.

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For several months now Mom and Dad had been putting aside part of their paychecks to buy the new Firestone refrigerator in the showroom of Star Oil, where Mom worked. It would take another couple weeks to have the cash in hand.

Mom’s boss offered to sell it “on credit,” but Dad was firmly against debt and would not let the fridge be delivered until they could pay for it in full.

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Just in time for Mom's birthday on April 24, the new refrigerator was delivered to the apartment. It was their first major purchase as a young couple, and Mom got absolutely giddy each time she put something in it. Even Dad couldn't help but smile when he saw it. Opening the door, he'd say things like, "May I pour you a spot of milk, M'lady?" as if he were a butler. Brand new things bring out the child in all of us.

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There was only one minor problem: the kitchen outlets had been wired before electric refrigerators were common, so where they had to plug in the fridge left it as conspicuous in their little kitchen as it had been in the window at Star Oil.... It did not quite look at home.