Whirlpool Open House 1953 - 16mm

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cadman

cadman

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Set your wayback machine for October, 1953, and come along for a tour and open house at Whirlpool Corp, St. Joe, MI.

If the 16mm Kodachrome isn't enough, there's also the still photos taken by WP's PR Dept, uploaded in Part 2. If you like these vids, please subscribe to The Laundry Archive. My hope is to upload something new each week.


 
These are fantastic, Cory. The fact that we can even see Kodachrome color film from this era digitized on YouTube, let alone of a major appliance manufacturer, is amazing.

Looking forward to the next installment on The Laundry Archive.

Ben
 
factory size

I bet that factory was huge. I know today it would take forever to walk through it with Maytag involved. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Whirlpool was the world leader of laundry in the world especially after coming out with the dual action agitator and direct drive unlike everybody else before them.
 
Evidently at that time both washers and dryers were produced in that location. To the best of my knowledge, all washers are now made in the Clyde, OH plant, and dryers in Marion, OH. Both of those are huge facilities, as is their dishwasher factory in Findlay, OH.
 
Re#5: Isn't that demo washer great?! And of course there was the matching dryer. And you're correct, these are silent films, often the only copy made. But I do have some commercially produced films with soundtracks in the pipeline.

Re#8: The Benton Harbor / St. Joe facility was absolutely massive. When the highway was realigned in the mid-50's to avoid driving through the factory campus, they actually built the new road as a straight shot -over the top- of the facility (top left corner of the pic below). The 1953 film captures this mid-way through construction, where they had finished the first elevated portion (in Part 2 there's a still image of a firetruck, and in the background is the elevated road and staircase employees would use). But you can see in Part 1 (where the "day's production" of all the boxes lined up) that the road ends in dirt.

Don't bother google-mapping any of this. It's all gone.

cadman-2025031517035000012_1.jpg
 
1953 whirlpool Saint Joseph Michigan open house

Thank you, Corey for posting this really enjoyed that, over the last few months. I’ve been going through boxes of literature from a friend that died who was in collector of anything whirlpool or KitchenAid. We haven’t scratched the surface of it yet finding lots of cool stuff some of which I’ll post.

I think the neatest thing about this huge factory in United States is the exact same company is still building the largest number of automatic washers in the United States in union plants here in Clyde, Ohio.

We can still buy high-quality American made appliances at a competitive price appliances that are easy to repair and have long lifespans.

The average new whirlpool built washing machine will not require nearly as many service calls as these early machines and many of them will last in excess of 30 years when they’re in lighter use situations, in fact, I’m sure the average life expectancy of the machines coming out of the factory Today is probably nearly twice as long as 1953 washers, which were lucky to last 10 years in spite of their high cost.

Keep up the great post Cory. I’ll try to post some pictures of some of the stuff. I’m uncovering.

John L
 
I highly doubt that today’s modern Whirlpool washers will be around in 30 years time. Quite a few of the Whirlpool VMW machines from around 2011 have already been crushed, some were less than 10 years old when they were junked.

If newer Whirlpools and machines, appliances, cars etc were REALLY that better, appliance technicians and mechanics would be out of a job, period.

When you have something that’s essentially a glorified compact washer thrown inside a full sized cabinet, won’t last for very long.
 
I went back and purchased a 4816 just to play around with from an appliance store that sold refurbs... Anyway, I get the thing home and after one load the drain pump would not shut off, so I tried to reset it, pulling the plug and then plugging it back in after 10 seconds. Would come right back on. I would push the start/pause button in for 3 seconds and then it would shut off but then 3 seconds later would come back on... These machines I think were introduced around 2016 ? Had the same thing happen on an Amana 4516... But fortunately the incident didn't repeat itself on that machine So tomorrow the guy is coming over and exchanging it for the KitchenAid that I saw on the floor..... We'll see how that goes.

agiflow-2025031616003306460_1.jpg
 
"The average new whirlpool built washing machine will not require nearly as many service calls as these early machines and many of them will last in excess of 30 years when they’re in lighter use situations, in fact, I’m sure the average life expectancy of the machines coming out of the factory Today is probably nearly twice as long as 1953 washers, which were lucky to last 10 years in spite of their high cost."

This has GOT to be a joke!

The VMW washers are a disaster for owners but a gold mine for repairmen and parts warehouses.

Dead control boards, mode shifters failures, stripped splutches, transmission failures, center seal leaks (getting better at those, I'll admit that), suspension rods failures, dead pumps, and the list goes on. These are not rare failures but very common ones. Because Whirlpool likes to obsolete parts in 15 years or less, NONE of these will make it anywhere near 30 years. I personally think these are a bigger disaster than the Calypso and most of those were crushed and recycled many years ago. There's almost none of those left and ALL parts are NLA. The Maytag Neptune top load FAV's are another example of a disaster. Almost none of those exist, either, and for a good reason.

Todays appliances are disposable junk with short lifespans and parts that are obesoleted rathery quickly, there's no arguing that anymore.
 
“Because Whirlpool likes to obsolete parts in 15 years or less”

Oh, tell me about it. Even back in the day Whirlpool made parts obsolete after 15 years or less, timers for my Whirlpool were already NLA by the late 70’s. Whirlpool from day one even back then wanted to the average lifespan to be 15 years or less. On the other hand, Maytag made machines for life, let the word of mouth be their advertising for them.
 

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