Somersaulting Teddy Bear
I remember the mechanized version of this ad in a Frigidaire dealer in Cocoa, FL. My father was meeting with people a couple of doors down the sidewalk, I had permission to go outside, but dared not go into the store for fear that he would emerge and not see me. I had no idea from one minute to the next when he would be through so all I could do was walk around on the sidewalk, in the heat, and look at the Frigidaire appliances through the window. This thing, which I saw up close later, was just a piece of posterboard with a fold out easel on the back to prop it up. There was a little motor behind the bear with a shaft that came through behind his thigh, I think, to turn the bear over and over at that fixed position.
The very kind and gracious Frigidaire dealer in Parma, OH who sold John most of his old manuals told us when we visited him that the 1959 washer was a total surprise to the dealers. They were expecting more Unimatics for 59 and were beating the bushes all over the nation to find remaining 1958 machines for themselves and their customers. The poor treatment of the dealers by GM and then the sudden selling of the name to White Consolidated Industries certainly helped explain some of the bad attitude I encountered when I first started calling seller/servicers for old Frigidaire washers, especially from one dealer in Bethesda. One interesting thing we were told in Parma by this dealer who was a big kitchen remodeler was that Frigidaire allowed him and other Frigidaire dealers who did a lot of kitchen work to also sell KitchAid because many people putting in a high end kitchen did not want the Frigidaire dishwasher.
Because the 58 had been top rated by CU in their mammoth automatic washer report that year, it was among the group of the top rated machines that were retested for the smaller 59 report. The new mechanism proved very unreliable for Frigidaire. I don't remember exactly, but I think the motors kept burning out because they were undersized so there was a lot of rebuilding of these machines in the home. The major difference I noticed between the WCI-60, which I had first and the WCI-58 which I had after it, was the top spin speed which was, I believe 850 in the 60 versus the 1140 in the 58. At some point in the early 60s, I think the top spin speed dropped even further into the 600s. Also, the mechanism in the 1960 started the spin on a slower speed so it did not throw the water as dramatically fast as the Unimatic. The slow agitation speed was incredibly gentle (boring), but used with the SOAK cycle was fabulous for woolens.
