The Fridge: An Appliance's Story

The other day on my ride, I saw a refrigerator at the curb awaiting pickup by the appliance recyclers. 

This was not surprising, as I had seen the moving van move the prior owners out a week earlier and another moving van move the new folks in just a few days prior.  In the neighborhood in which I was riding, located roughly a par 5 from 3M World Headquarters, moving vans aren’t exactly an uncommon occurrence.

The house itself was nothing spectacular. A well-tended, tasteful, 1950s era ranch/rambler located mid-block within a block of what would have been the major streets of that area, it blended in with many of its neighbors and the street would have formed a sort of period mosaic had it not have been for the overfed 1990s era monstrosity on the corner.

What was unusual about the scene was the refrigerator itself. It was small, it was rounded, and, in a sort of dymaxion script, the word “Kelvinator” was still visible in glorious, gleaming chrome.  The door, dutifully removed as required by law, leaned against the unit, never again to form that tight bond to keep the food cold and fresh. 

The homes of this era in this part of town do not have basements, instead being built on slabs in a sort of assembly-line fashion in order to meet the pent-up postwar demand. 

Clearly, then, this could not have been a basement fridge, kept near the wet bar or in a game room, either for nostalgic taste or because the guys who brought the new fridge wanted way too much money to haul away the old one. The lack of dust and grime signaled that this also wasn’t a garage fridge. 

This very well could have been the original unit from when the home was built.

This raised the eyebrows even more. If the original unit was kept, what would the rest of the house look like? 

Would there be pastel tile and fixtures in the bath? Was the rest of the house a sort of time warp back into the 1950s/60s?

Who was the person who owned this old appliance? 

Was it a non-descript “John Johnson” type (or Mrs. John Johnson, as she likely still would self-reference), the “plank-owner” of the house, or just someone who liked the aesthetics of the past?

These are questions I’ll likely never know as its not likely that a guy in cycling gear can ever pull off passing as either the moving crew or the new owner long enough to get answers to these questions.

To be sure, this refrigerator came from a far different era. They kept cool stuff cold and frozen stuff frozen.  They didn’t filter your water, start your coffee maker, or allow you to update your status on Facebook.  They did a simple job and they did it pretty well.  You can still probably find them today in cabins, basements, and garages across the state.

Compared to this era, the refrigerants were much more primitive as well, featuring chemicals and gases that have helped to create a wondrous hole in the ozone.  Of course, thirty years from now, we may find that our refrigerants are doing the same thing. This will leave us only with the option of putting a penguin  thinking cold thoughts inside in exchange for being allowed to scarf down a few Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks on occasion.

The roundedness and the gleaming chrome came from that post war Moderne era.  The wars were over, Johnny was home, the Spartan depression era and its deprivation were done and consumerism was running rampant. Cars! Appliances! Television! Air Travel!  We were entering a world that was going to be gleaming, streamlined, peaceful, and prosperous, and, boy-oh-boy, was this Kelvinator the epitome of that world!

But did you notice the sentence about the door being removed from its hinges and leaning against the unit? Part of the reason why these fridges have kept things cold for so long is because they literally latched closed. You would pull the handle away from the door and, much like a car door, a locking mechanism would disengage between the door and the frame, the door would open, and voila!, you could get your cold milk for your cereal. 

This was great for keeping stuff cold because you knew with the door latched, there would be no gaps from a door being partially open and you could hear it close.  You knew that there existed no chance in the world that yesterday’s roasted chicken could battering-ram the door open and make a run for it.

Ah, but there was the rub for these old units. They were fine while they were in the house, but once you got rid of it, it suddenly became bad news.  Kids are curious creatures that have active imaginations. What is an old fridge to you or me is suddenly the booth from the game show “21” or one of those new Mercury spacecrafts to climb into and be sealed inside for your orbital flight, just like Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra, and Cooper (or suborbital like Grissom or Shepard).

This might have been fine if you were with your buddies, but if you were alone, the fun and games became sad music and slow walking for everyone else.  No way to exit from inside existed.  No one had ever considered the concept of needing to egress from inside because, let’s face it, refrigeration of this nature had been around, at most, two generations.  Experience had not told the design engineers that this problem might exist.

Perhaps these latched doors were also a sign of the times, a subliminal need for security in an insecure world?  A world where one massive bomb could not only ruin your day, and the days of many others in not only your neighborhood, but your metropolitan area. Joe Stalin may have been dead, but was Nikita Khrushchev any great bargain?  It wouldn’t be until the end of the 1950s that Dick Nixon would prove our superiority in the “Kitchen Debate," but before then, we could not fall behind those Communists in the ever-important lettuce crisper technology!

Perhaps too much can be read into one old fridge on one curb, on a side street, in a suburb. (Perhaps I could string a few more prepositional phrases together?) The world is filled with objects.  One person’s junk is another person’s ephemera. To some, old buildings are things to be torn down and replaced with gleaming new structures, to others, they tell a story not just of occupants and activities, but also of a time gone by, the architecture and layout itself as much as the owners and users.  

This isn’t to say that things should not be changed, updated, or discarded.  The world around us isn’t meant to be placed in aspic and kept in stasis.  We do, however, need to understand where we’ve been, individually and as a society, so that we can learn from both successes and failures to accentuate the former and minimize the latter.

And that’s the view from the old, steel, classic drafting table.