Symbol of better living 1960

[foraloysius]

Love this little gem. Lots of General Electric appliances displayed. A promotional film for Living better electrically.

 

[launderess]

Medallion Homes

Seems to have been a 1950's promotional campaign for home builders, not name of a company per se. Idea was to build a large number of homes were nearly all if not most of mod cons and HVAC ran on electricity. Why may one ask? Pipe:

"In the 1950s, when the all-electric home-building campaign was launched, the process of making electricity was not as efficient as it is today. The utilities rushed to build electrical plants to streamline production, and as the cost of electricity decreased, homeowners were encouraged to consume more power. The more they used, the less they paid. "

https://www.smecc.org/live_better_electrically_medallion_home.htm

"By 1960, over 850,000 families were living in Gold Medallion Homes. Western areas of the U.S. that experienced a great deal of post World War II building will also be areas that have many Gold Medallion Homes: Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Phoenix, and Seattle."

https://www.thespruce.com/gold-medallion-home-definition-1821516

Great find Louis! Thanks for posting.

One does have that GE toaster/oven, and it works a treat. Also have a GE Mobile Maid dishwasher (just finished unloading matter of fact), so that's me for you.

 

[launderess]

Few quibbles about that video. LOL

If the housewife came into a darkened kitchen, presumably after the family had been out, who put that pie in oven what was nearly done?

Considering short shelf life of even refrigerated milk back then several quarts (all those glass bottles in fridge door shelf), seems rather excessive.

If the home had electric radient heat in floor, why also need for baseboard units as well?

That house had to be somewhere out in the southwest or maybe west. Few if anyone in NY area would use electric for heating if they could help it; even back in the 1950's. Rates were just too dear and it gets very cold here for several months per year.

 

[foraloysius]

Apparently it was a joint campaign of General Electric and Westinghouse.

https://dahp.wa.gov/historic-preser...lly-the-gold-medallion-electric-home-campaign

Here's a Westinghouse video, I think it was already posted here some time, but it's nice anyway. ;-)

 

[iej]

Old Irish marketing material

We had similar campaigns here and "Gold Shield All Electric Homes".

Some great old adverts including all the exhibition, TV ads, print ads going right back to the 1920s from ESB, Ireland's old electricity company.

All here : https://esbarchives.ie/

They literally said if your bill was bigger, it's because you're living better !?

Early 60s



1980:



Also interesting it went from "helps your wife with the cleaning" to dad taking care of a baby 25 years later.

 

[DADoES]

 
House the parents had built in 1964 had a medallion on the doorbell button facia.  Appliances were a mix of brands but not GE or Westinghouse.  Central heating but window A/C units.  No dishwasher until the KDI-17a.

 

[iej]

We could go full circle again where electricity for home heating starts to make sense from an environmental point of view. We just need a lot more sustainable generation of power first.

Hear pump a make sense today but using resistance heaters if your generation mix is mostly fossil fuels makes no sense at all.

 

[iowabear]

I had an Aunt who lived in the country in Missouri and she had a house with electric ceiling heat.  Of course this was interesting to me and I was disappointed that I couldn't see anything happening, like the glowing coils on a stove, LOL.  (I was very young at the time.)

 

She didn't like it.  She spent a lot of time at her kitchen table and said that her feet were always cold.

 

[norgeway]

re Gold Medallion home

There were many specifications you had to meet to get that medallion, there were insulation requirements, the home had to have electric heat, cooking, water heating and a electric dryer I believe, im not sure about ac, my uncle was a electrical contractor and he put in about a million miles of electric radiant ceiling heat, I always loved it, no air stirring up dust, and of course as with baseboard heat, it had almost no service problems.the main thing in a medallion home was that there were requirements on how many circuits the rooms had to have, unlike earlier when 2 or 3 rooms might be on one fuse, if you find one of these homes today, the wiring is much more compatable with todays appliances

 

[ea56]

Re: Reply #2

Launderess you question the several quarts of milk on the refrigerator shelf, but that wasn’t unusal. We had a Milkman that delivered twice weekly 8 qts of milk, there were three kids in our family and we went through about a quart at every meal. My mom used to say that we filled up on milk.LOL

And as far as the pie being in oven when they came home in the evening from being out, well Milady most likely set the delayed start on the oven and put the pie in the oven before the family left on their outing. This would have been a great advertising point of the convenience of a new electric range. They even were making this point in electric advertising films as far back as the 30’s when delayed start ovens were first becoming available.

I think that the example of the radiant heating wires being installed in the ceiling of the home early in the film may have been a different home than the one later on that showed the baseboard heater, because I doubt seriously that anyone would have installed both in same home. Although, it is possible that they may have chosen different heating types for individual rooms. This would have been a point to make that one could heat each indivdual room with electricity using the type of heating best suited to each room.

In California these all electric homes were extremely popluar in the 50’s and 60’s, and highly sought after. It was thought to be the height of modern living, so this little promotional film is right on the money from my perspective of having lived during that time in California. In fact, when my husband’s family built a new home in 1962, they built a Gold Medallion Home, and the Marin County Independent Journal did a feature article on their new home.

The ads for rentals and new homes used to prominately state the the home or apt. had an AEK=all electric kitchen, which everyone wanted.

I enjoyed this little bit of history Louis, thanks for posting it.

Eddie

[this post was last edited: 9/16/2018-12:51]

 

[rp2813]

Eddie -- as I read through your post, I remembered looking through the classified ads for rental apartments/homes and seeing "AEK," and then saw your mention of it further down.    That abbreviation was prevalent back when I was hopping from place to place in my younger days.

 

I presumed GE was somehow associated with the film in the OP, as the town of Schenectady was referenced up front.

 

[ea56]

The thing that I found the most ludicrous about the OP film was the construction worker spreading out that gingham tablecloth and plugging in that brand new GE electric perc at the job site. In those highly homophobic times that poor dude would have been hazed right off the job for being “light in the loafers” Now maybe if the “little woman” brought him lunch and stayed with him to have lunch and spread out the tablecloth, that may have been believable.

My Uncle Harold worked in construction in the 50’s and early 60’s and he brought a lunch pail and quart Thermos of coffee to work, the thought of a table cloth and electirc perc would have never crossed his mind. If Aunt Louise brought him his lunch, and I once went with her when she did this, they ate in the comfort of the car.

Eddie[this post was last edited: 9/16/2018-14:06]

 

[launderess]

@eddie

Yes, can see a typical "large" post war family with several children needing all that milk; but one shown in film had just the one. *LOL* Besides am more than certain there was a "milkman" route (who didn't have them back then?) so it wasn't as if they needed to stock up for the duration.

Am confused; always thought radiant heat (water, electric, etc...) went into floors. This to take advantage of physics which tells us that heat rises. Why would anyone then put such heat in a ceiling? Or is the film actually showing the system going into floors?

@Louis:

Westinghouse and General Electric would push electric homes wouldn't they? More mod cons in a household that ran on electricity means increased sales of various large and small appliances.

IIRC many power companies both before and after WWII (maybe even WWI) sold various electric appliances (washing machines, clothes irons, etc....) again to get demand up.

In general:

These films obviously lacked serious editing and or continuity; which is fine because they were basically PR/ad campaigns; not a documentary.

In second film Louis posted the housewife is showing her friend the "laundry area" with a TOL Westinghouse Laundromat W&D set. Yet when showing off the powder room with heated mirror there is a Westinghouse FL (maybe combo unit) just to the side surrounded by built in cabinetry.

 

[launderess]

Not Exactly All Electric

But many new apartment buildings here in NYC both rental and condo/co-op are going with PTAC and or electric baseboards for HVAC, electric cooking(coils, ovens, induction cook tops, etc...), and laundry (washing machines and condenser/non-vented dryers).

Developers are doing this especially for rentals because it reduces cost of operating a building. Tenants are responsible for their own heat, and for whatever costs incurred by cooking. City government and or advocates for the "poor" decry such actions for many reasons. Most common is given high New York rates for electricity even a moderately cold winter can see monthly bills of several hundred.

Worse some buildings mandate per lease that tenants must keep their heat on at a minimum temp basically 24/7. IIRC this is to deal with the physics of thermal heating; a cold apartment will such in heating from warmer units surrounding.

 

[appnut]

The scene where they walk into the house in the evening and turn on the lights in the den, it's those fluorescent "offset" lights that shine up on the ceiling and reflect off the ceiling.  My "other mother's" 1961 house across the street had that in her den. Naturally, when the house was bought and "remodeled", those lights were removed, but the cathedral ceiling in the den remained.   It was a Reddy Killowatt Medallion House.  It had gas for the patio and front sidewalk gas lights as well as gas for a clothes dryer and gas lighter in the fireplace.  The house had a heat pump; a Westinghouse kitchen and Westinghouse Computer Control Laundromat pair in the laundry room for the Parade of Homes.  The house also had a garage door opener.  The original water heater may have been electric, but at some point in the 53 years, a gas one was installed. 

 

[rp2813]

Back in the '60s -- and maybe '70s until the first energy crisis hit -- PG&E was promoting the purchase of new appliances through a multi-media campaign.  Most memorable were the billboards, one theme being "Don't be a dishwasher -- buy one."  Another was something on the order of "Ice Follies of 1964" or whatever, depicting a woman trying not to spill as she placed trays into the freezing section of an old refrigerator, suggesting the purchase of a new frost free refrigerator with ice maker.  Or maybe she was just trying to defrost it.  My memory is hazy on that one

 

Eddie might remember some others.  All I know is that we stuck with our '49 Westinghouse refrigerator until the early '70s and didn't get a dishwasher (a portable absolute BOL top load Frignature -- of course) until about then as well.  Everybody had a newer refrigerator than we did.   That held true for the '49 Westinghouse stove too -- up until 2008 to be exact. 

 

[launderess]

One of the beautful things about steam heating

That used radiators or baseboards is that the boiler or boilers could be put to work soon as everything was hooked up, tested and approved. This meant workers in winter could have heat instead of a cold (or freezing) building.

Back on topic:

While both are a sad sight today, in their heyday both General Electric and Westinghouse put out some great small and large appliances. GE also had a pretty reputable HVAC line including all sorts of oil and gas heating and hot water systems.

This brochure from General Electric entitled "Everything Electrical, for the *Modern* home" shows the post war push for households to move on up.

https://archive.org/stream/GeneralElectricCo.0005#page/n7

To put this in perspective well into the 1950's people were still using ice boxes for refrigeration, even in large urban areas long since wired for electricity. Homes and other buildings were still burning coal for heating and or hot water supply.

 

[rp2813]

". . . people were still using ice boxes . . ."

Yes, most memorably (even if not a "real" person), Alice Kramden.  I remember one episode of "The Honeymooners" where she was ranting about the state of affairs in her kitchen and, referring to the ice box stated, "Oh, I forgot to defrost it," as she walked over to the box and reached underneath it to extract a large round pan full of water that she dumped into the sink.

 

I suppose Ed and Trixie had an actual refrigerator, as they were the standard to be judged by.

 

[ea56]

We had a babysitter in Richmond, Calif. that still used an icebox. She had an early 40’s GE refrigerator and when it conked out she had her grandson, Shorty bring her old icebox back into the kitchen from her storage shed. This would have been about 1958-59, and believe it or not there was still an iceman that delivered the 50 lb. blocks of ice with the huge icetongs and I can remember him slinging those big blocks of ice into the top of that ice box. Mrs.Krenzer would scream at us whenever we opened the icebox up, “Shut that door, your making my ice melt and I’ll break your neck”. Neck breaking was her go to threat.

During the Summer my parents used to rent a log cabin in Chester, Calif. at the Saint Bernard Lodge in 1958 that had an icebox on the back porch and a great big wood cook stove in the kitchen. These antiquities didn’t phase either of my parents in the least, they had been part of both of their childhoods, and they actually enjoyed the nostalgia of it. Mom used to make great Apple Pies in a cast iron frying pan in that old wood stove. It was like “Little House on the Prairie”, LOL. Its one of my fondest memories of both my parents.

Eddie[this post was last edited: 9/16/2018-22:14]