Coolerator Ice Box Disguised As a Fridge

[rp2813]

This is a first for me.  I've only known classic ice boxes with wood exteriors or ones that looked like Alice Cramden's.

 

One thing I do know is that locating a 20-pound block of ice nearby would be an impossible task.

 

 

 

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/atq/4976287779.html

 

[ea56]

I remember iceboxes like this very well. In the late 50's my family used to vacation at the St. Bernard Lodge in Chester, Calif. My father rented the log cabin by the week for our stays there. On the back porch there was an ice box that looked just like a refrigerator, you put the block of ice where the freezer compartment would have been. The ice used to last about 3 days if I recall correctly. There was also a wood cookstove in the kitchen. Both my parents loved going there, it reminded them of how life was during their childhoods. We also had a babysitter in Richmond that moved her icebox back into the kitchen when her fridge went out. And believe it or not there was still an iceman that delivered to her house in 1958! I can remember him coming into the kitchen with the block of ice hanging from the the tongs and throwing it into the top of the icebox while we were eating breakfast. I have seen old magazine ads for at least one brand of refrigerator that sold electric and gas refrigerators and iceboxes and the cabinets looked the same for all three models, the brand name slips my memory though. Maybe someone else here has seen one of these ads and can recall what the brand was. Maybe it was Servel? I think that the damp cold was supposed to keep the food fresher according to my Mom. Even if you didn't cover the food it wouldn't dry out like in a refrigeratror.

 

[twintubdexter]

I saw a small handful of these Coolerator ice-box refrigerators come in as trades. The were sent automatically to the "cage" in the parking lot and then scrapped. I also remember an ad from a very old magazine that talked about how much better an ice block refrigerator was because it "washed" the air...yeah right!

 

[rp2813]

Ah, Chester.  Sometime in the late '60s family friends bought the bar up there (I assume it was the only bar).  They had a shared interest in a cabin located on a Feather River tributary in a the tiny settlement of Seneca, where the local telephone exchange had about a dozen subscribers, all with crank wall phones and the directory was a mimeographed sheet of paper with ring codes for each.

 

When I knew a pilot back around 1980, four of us flew up to Chester for an over-nighter.  We just put our sleeping bags out in the woods next to the airport.  I swear, the mosquitoes sounded like small aircraft on a nocturnal mission.  I got one bite on my wrist so bad that I couldn't stop scratching it and if I tried hard enough, could probably still find the scar from it now.

 

That's an interesting story about Richmond still having an ice man into the late '50s.  We had Union Ice not far from us but it's long gone, replaced by "Georgetown" styled row houses.  Another source, Modern Ice, met with the same type of fate.   Joe, I'm sure you remember both, as well as the smaller ice house around the corner from Western Appliance.

 

Down in L.A., I think on either Melrose or Santa Monica, the old Union Ice facility there was turned into a giant disco.   I've forgotten the name of the place.   I just remember feeling really old the one time I was in there, and I was barely 30 at the time.

 

[norgeway]

My Mother grew up in a house

That did not have electricity until 1938, when she was 9, Her and my Aunt remembered well the iceman and doing homework by a kerosene lamp!, Grandmother amd Granddaddy bought a Apex fridge in 38, and replaced it with a big Westinghouse in 50.

 

[ptcruiser51]

Mom & Dad had an icebox similar to this the way they described it. They bought it used. Since they were married November 1947, for the first month or so they used a window box to keep evaporated milk and cold cuts, soda and juice cold. Later in 1948 they got a Westinghouse fridge using my aunt's employee discount (she worked in the Westinghouse plant in Newark, NJ). It was the same one the Cunninghams had on "Happy Days". We lived in a poor neighborhood; even when I was a kid in the mid-50s we had a merchant down the street who sold bagged coal and block ice, so there must have been a need for both even at that time.

 

[jamiel]

Apparently they were all you could get on the open market during WW2...I saw one in an antique shop from that era with wooden dowel shelves (rather than wire).

 

[tomturbomatic]

When my father was transferred to California during the early days of WWII, he and mom found a place at Pisomo beach. There was a wooden cabinet that was like an icebox. Mom disinfected it with bleach before she would use it. I think they had a refrigerator in Riverside.

 

[circlew]

My parents lived in a small mobile home - more like a travel trailer - in the early 50's, during the Korean War. My dad was in the Army, and they wre living near Elizabethtown, KY.

I've got a picture of that trailer somewhere, and it shows the ice box, which looked a lot like the one shown. I remember my mom said she forgot to empty the pan, and there was water all over the kitchen floor the next morning.

They soon got a larger MH, and it had an electric refrigerator.