Walking into the only Sears store on Ponce de Leon in Atlanta and smelling the hot oil in which they fried the peanuts at the candy counter and the chromed safety rail around the hot glass between you and the little fryer with the basket in the oil.
Big downtown department stores with several floors, showcase windows on the street and their big Housewares and Appliance Departments, mostly GE and Norge at Rich's with a brief run of AMC stuff that was kinda weird and made even cheaper. There was a place in the downtown store where the escalator had a glass panel on the side so that you could see what it looked like inside as it moved. Davison-Paxon, later just Davison's (Macys-owned even at the time Mr. and Mrs. Strauss went down with the Titanic) which sold, at various times: Westinghouse (only place I saw the L1000 and matching dryer. I remember the funny fabric softener dispenser that you turned upside down and inserted through the lower part of the control panel), Hotpoint, Whirlpool(first place I saw the combo. I was around 9 and remember opening the door and looking waaaay up in that big dark drum.) and,later, Frigidaire & Maytag. The 1973 WIAT in our collection is the machine I found on sale the first Labor Day that the stores stayed open. It was a floor model MARKED DOWN from $284 to $248. We bought our Side-Swing door Laundromat there years earlier and I bought my DE 806, still on the shipping skids on the floor, but on clearance, for $199 in 1975.
When I was between 2 and almost 5, we lived outside of Ottawa, Illinois. There was a big, old funeral home somewhere in town. It looked like an old mansion and had a big covered porch and was set back on its lawn from the street. On this porch, placed at an angle so it could be seen by passing traffic, was a big clock. The magic thing about this clock was that, at night, it not only had a lighted face, but around the face, there was this moving green lighted circle. It seemed like it was made up of small rectangular openings and the green light came through them. The clock sat surrounded by absolute darkness and was mesmerizing to me. One slow trip past it was never enough. Friends had a Westinghouse range that turned on the flourescent light when any surface unit was switched on.
The Christmas decorations that were strung across the main streets in small towns and the special treat of taking a ride at night to look at them and people's Christmas trees and outside decorations. The last time I saw towns decorated like that was on overnight train trips between Union Station in DC and Atlanta in the 70s. And when I was still in elementary school, I remember the beauty of the German Christmas ornaments that would be featured at the dime stores. Of course, for most of those years, I could not go by my self to look at them and had no money to buy them so that added to their magic. I remember being taken to Marshall Fields once when very young and being show the Christmas tree that went from downstairs in the Walnut Room up through a cut out in each floor.
W.T. Grants in the mid to late 50s when our store opened its basement as Christmas Toyland with the giant toy department along with the stock of decorations and lights. Later, the basement was made into part of the selling area with the neat, if sometimes weird, Bradford appliances, some of which were like the AMC line, but one 30" range was clearly a Westinghouse.
The pet section of Woolworths, Grants, Kresgees et al. I had aquariums and hamsters and little green turtles. As we traveled around the Southeast with my father during the summers and stopped at shopping centers for groceries, I would have to check out the dime store aquariums. If you could spot the houseplant department with all of the greenery, you knew that the pet department was close by. At one Holiday Inn, in the breeze way near the laundry, I saw the first model of the Bendix Duomatic. It would be about 8 years before I found mine. At another one in Florida, I saw one of the mid-50s GE dryers out for scrap. It would not be until the 1980s when John and I delivered a pair of orbital Maytags that we got that dryer along with a flop down (clam shell) control panel Frigidaire washer. I had no idea that I would ever have either when I saw them so many years before.
The small African aquatic frogs and newts that were introduced to the aquarium trade.
Summers and transistor radios and listening late at night when the clear channel AM stations came in from places far from Atlanta, like Chicago, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Schenectady (the GE station), Ft. Wayne (maybe). Most had top 40 playlists, but one had a program that began, "And now, Moonriver." It had a lot of pipe organ music and aired around midnight. Because Georgia did not go on Daylight Saving Time we shared the same time as Chicago and other central time zone places during the summer. One DJ always ended his show with "More" the theme from Modo Cane.
The years in the early 80s when my brother would find used appliance places where he would take us when John and I drove down there on some appliance-related trip. It was from one of these places that we brought back the 40" Westinghouse range with the 36" wide oven that is in the collection, the stainless steel French Door wall oven and I think John's giant Kenmore dryer that was sold one page behind all of the regular laundry pairs with the 18 pound washer, like it was some kind of embarrassment to have that much laundry. He found us a WO-65-2 and a GE combo at a place in Conyers.
The years when my brother was still alive and the fun we had together. We could start talking about everyday situations and wind up laughing so hard we could hardly breathe
When people knew how to behave in public.
When the Georgia Power Co. and the Atlanta Gas Light Co. sold appliances and, in addition to the big downtown showrooms, had stores scattered in other locations so you could duck in and get a quick appliance fix to help you get through the day. I was a big advocate for paying bills in person. Those were victims of the first energy crisis.
Thanksgiving, 1958, when we went to Milwaukee because my mother's father was not expected to live much longer (he died in the spring of 1963). I got to stay with my wonderful Aunt Mary's family. She had 3 children older than I; in fact my cousin Jack was begining to drive. My aunt had a job, but cooked and baked like she was in a Bakeoff every day of her life. We got up early on Thanksgiving and she put the turkey in the oven of her Thermador range, not builtin, but a 36 or 40 inch range. Then we went to Mass at their huge church, a big first for me. When we came back home we had a big breakfast and everytime the turkey was basted, I got a spoonful of dressing. She made Parker House rolls; yeast dough, kneaded and after the second rise we rolled the dough into little balls that were put 3 each into cupcake pans and put to rise in the warming oven. All of the other stuff like the smashed potatoes were made and we ate. After we ate and the dishes were done(by hand), we went downstairs and started what I guess was a week's laundry. The last time I had been there, she had the Maytag Master square insulated tub washer that she had bought from my mom when we moved from a Chicago apartment to a house where we could have an automatic, but now she had a pair of Highlanders. The washer was a sudsaver model with a toggle switch on the control panel for Hot or Warm and the dryer was one of the first HOH models in gas with a galvanized, not porcelain drum. Because she had been used to washing in a Maytag "Conventional" washer (don't call it a wringer), her routine was like nothing I had ever seen. The clothes were sorted and the first white load went in with hot water. They washed, the suds were saved in the covered sink, the washer finished the cycle, the clothes were transferred to the dryer, the suds returned and another load started. When that load was finished, the still damp clothes were removed from the dryer (gas Maytag HOH dryers were slower than the electrics) and hung on lines in the basement to finish drying. I don't think that anything dried all of the way because they only dried for the length of a washer cycle. It was so much fun because it was a family operation. At least 2 of my cousins were down there in this assembly line operation. The dryer had its own little storm window in the basement window that you had to remember to open and shut. I was sad when it was all over. I went down there later and it was just a place with clothes hanging and all of the machinery silent; sort of like after a Wash-In. I had to return to my grandparents' house that evening. My family was leaving in the morning. On the way back across town, a song came on the radio, "To Know, Know, Know Him Is To Love, Love, Love Him..." and every time she sang that, my Uncle Johnny would say, "Who, Me?"
I really miss old independent stores, like appliance dealers and hardware stores where you might walk in and find stuff from 30 or 40 years ago.
Music from the 50s and 60s. Perry Como, "Find a wheel...," when the Beach Boys were closer to being boys or young men, "Telstar" the song and the satellite and the promises of the better life that technology would bring us. When Dick Tracy's two way wrist radio was something as fictional as Flash Gordon and Boy's Life foresaw Scout camps where, even in winter, you could wear the summer uniform because the whole camp was radiantly heated with electricity from cheap nuclear power.
Sitting on the sofa with Daddy between my brother and me, sharing a bowl of potato chips as he read us the funnies on Sunday.
