Handy Hannah
This thread brought me back to Winters in the 1980's as a kid.
Growing up we had a wood burning fireplace in the living room and it was the primary source of heat.... we also had central air heating that ran off propane from one of those big giant tanks in the yard (lived out in the country) but the fireplace heat was free, only cost the manual labor of harvesting firewood, and we did what we could to get by.
So the thing had to stay burning constantly in the cold months, it stayed well stoked during the day and evening but you could only do so much at night. In the early morning, if you were lucky and it had been stoked here and there when someone got up in the night to pee or somthing, there was still a coal bed smoldering.. so out came this ancient hair dryer to blow the coals and bring them back to life to catch the fresh kindling on fire.
It sounds crazy but it did the job nicely, basically an electric bellows to spark up the coals. Dad was a junker and found it who knows where, the fact it was metal and not the more modern plastic kind made it suited to the job and we even had a stand for it... the wooden handle is a hollow dowel so somewhere my Mom dug out this base to an old plant stand or a paper towel holder or something that once the original attachment was removed left this threaded peg on the wooden base that the dryer fit right in so it could stand upright unsupported.
These pictures aren't mine but it's the same model, made in the 1950's I believe, the body is metal, the handle wooden and those toggle switches and the tooled vents on the side make it look like a Ray Gun right out of a 1950's Sci Fi movie.
