Jack Santoro is the Founder and Historian of the Old Appliance Club. He
has been restoring antique ranges and refrigerators for 25 years and is
the editor of The Old Road Home Vintage Appliance Quarterly.
INT: Which appliances have had the most impact on society?
JS: Positively, refrigerators and stoves. The large appliances really
dramatically changed things for Americans, actually for people all over
the world. Years ago, before there were appliances, if you wanted to
wash your clothes, you had to boil water, and then you had to make soap.
You had to boil the clothes out, and use a scrub board. When they
started to invent washing machines you didn't have to do that. Once
people got used to using electricity to make food - for boiling things
and stuff like that - it was incredible. If you wanted to cook food in
the old days, you had to use a wood or a cold fire. That took a long
time to really know how to regulate and tons of meals, I'm sure, were
wasted.
INT: After new appliances were invented, what did it take to convince
people of their value?
JS: Housewives were doing almost all the cooking then. They really had
to be convinced, that these things (such as the electric range) were
actually going to be able to do this kind of work. General Electric was
working on electric ranges and they would have promotional tours. They
would have a home economist go out and give demonstrations at all the
electrical utility offices throughout the United States. People would
come in to pay their bills and they would see the equipment and the
cakes and pies that you could make, it was all set up. General Electric
would show how you could use all of these appliances and how much easier
it would be, how much cleaner the house would be when you didn't use
wood and coal. The stuff was pretty drab looking in the beginning, but
it only took like a few years and then they started to get into
decorating them, and changing the colors on them. With the added
convenience of being able to cook without having to chop wood or go and
get coal or bend over a tub and scrub all kinds of clothes and stuff,
you know, that was a tremendous milestone.
INT: How has the way that people find out about appliances changed?
Obviously there was less mass marketing in the early days.
JS: The idea was to go straight to the consumer. They would send
salesmen out on the road with samples of a product. And they would go
into like a general store in the middle of Idaho and would demonstrate
the product. Most of the time, they probably had a hard time convincing
people. Maybe they would leave one or two machines there for them to
try for a month or two. Maytag, back in about the 1920s, had a guy
called Cowboy Joe Long. He was a cow punch from Texas and he used to
have a couple of different burros. On the left and the right hand side
of the saddle they had a special carrier and they would have these small
Maytag washing machines that they would bring out on the range to these
different ranches. They would bring their little mule train and Joe
would come out and demonstrate. There was no electricity out there. So
what Maytag did is they made a motor that had a pedal and you'd press
down on the pedal and jump-start it. It would be a gasoline engine.
INT: How do appliances vary from nation to nation?
JS: The rest of the world looks to the American market for direction.
There are toasters that were made here in the 1920s and '30s and '40s
that will be made in Europe today, and they look the same way. And one
way they might be better is that they would copy a design, and instead
of welding pieces together like on a mass production line, they would
screw all the parts together with little screws and nuts and bolts.
That's the kind of thing you can just take it apart and fix it. If you
go to Mexico, people are still using appliances that would be tossed
away here, even stuff from the '70s and '80s. None of that is thrown
away. They will make that work again. In Mexico you will see ranges
from the early days and into the 1940s and '50s and everybody's still
using them.
INT: Do you believe that appliances were better constructed in the
earlier half of the century than they are today?
JS: My company has restored or refurbished over 17,000 ranges since
1973. You could easily see that no recycled metals were used to make the
older ranges. All of that stuff was premium top grade equipment.
That's the only reason why it's even still around. The quality is
absolutely there. Plus, they're very simple. And so when you have
simplicity you can repair it with just hand tools (unless it requires
some kind of welding). In my house I've got a 1935 General Electric
monitor top refrigerator that has never been repaired once. It's still
working great. That's typical. You'll find refrigerators from the early
line - 1927, some even pre 1927 - and they're still working great. I
consider the stuff after 1955 to start to take a very, very gentle
slide. They start to cut the quality as they start to mass-produce.
When you have companies that are giving all kinds of benefits, they've
got to get the money from somewhere and they can only charge so much for
an appliance. So somewhere along the line the quality's got to be cut.
For information about The Old Appliance Club, contact Jack Santoro at
Post Office Box 65,
Ventura, California 93002
Phone: 805-643-3532
Email: JES@west.net
Web: http://www.antiquestoves.com
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