Is your refrigerator running?
Are you going to chase it?
It would have been easier to catch on April Fool's Day 1919. Refrigerators didn't run then. They sat quietly in the kitchen and tried not to leak.
For reasons unknown (by me), the week of April 1, 1919, was declared "Refrigerator Week" — at least in the pages of the Arkansas Gazette. That April 1 paper included two pages of advertisements from Little Rock stores promoting the high-tech refrigerators they had for sale.
Among the blandishments:
■ The irresistible appeal of snowy white porcelain. Leonard Cleanable refrigerators supported the health of their owners because "no other material is so easy to keep spotlessly clean." Also, it "cannot break, chip or crack!"
Among the Leonard's patented features were:
Ten walls to save your ice. The Leonard Cleanable is insulated by ten different walls.
■ The Bohn siphon. Sold exclusively by the Allen Hardware Co., the Bohn brand Sanitor and Icyco models were the only refrigerators made with a genuine siphon.
The stale and impure air from about the food is automatically sucked into the ice chamber. Here it is purified.
And these models were made of solid oak -- lined with porcelain! So easy to clean!
■ A refrigerator was an economical, humanitarian and patriotic investment. In addition to this it was a great comfort.
■ It lessened the work of the housewife.
■ It increased the efficiency and earning power of the man.
Wait, how could buying a refrigerator make a man earn more money?
Increase your vitality and health and you increase your earning power, improve your environment, add to your prestige and know the full joy of living.
A good refrigerator was an investment with a high earning rate — 33 percent, according to the Arkansas Carpet & Furniture Co. at Sixth and Main streets.
From the day you put it in your kitchen it will start in saving food and ice. ... An Alaska Refrigerator will pay for itself — in the average household — once every three years.
A sizable chunk of what today we recognize as advertorial copy accompanied the ads, and it made forceful arguments in favor of investing. Here is a taste of the copywriter's passionate commitment to the promulgation of home refrigeration:
Even the ancients recognized the necessity of ice for preserving food, and Nero is said to have had his icehouses, while in Rome ice pits were common, dug deep, their walls carefully insulated with straw and topped with a thatched roof. In the East Indies, after dusk, the natives fill shallow earthen vessels with water, and in the morning, before sunrise, they scale off the thin layer of ice which has formed during the night, packing these thin sheets of ice, hundreds of them, deep into a pit.
I like imagining Motivated Shopper in 1919 urging her husband to close his eyes and envision his lady wife bent double in the chill of dawn, scraping ice scale off a flowerpot: "Is that what you would have me do? Darling, I want a refrigerator."
It is a far cry from these primitive methods of food storage to our scientific household refrigerators today, which are considered, and rightly so, almost indispensable to our modern American homes.
Why? because "most of our present day foods are so complex that they deteriorate rapidly in warm weather, unless kept in a refrigerator."
That's right. Modern Arkansans were eating much more complex foods than Nero had struggled to keep cool.
But the copywriter was just getting started. His big-guns arguments: Buying a refrigerator would 1) reduce food waste and 2) combat infant mortality.
Today, we blame the refrigerator as contributing to food waste.
We think we'll eat the food so we buy it all. We eat some and put the leftovers into a little tub, which we put the fridge. We close the door and forget about it ... while it quietly transmogrifies. Then we don't want to open the lid. We toss tub and food together.
Refrigerator dealers did not envision this possibility in 1919:
L.S. Osborne, head of the Waste Disposal Conservation Section of the Food Administration says: "Twenty-nine cities with a total population of 17,000,000 are discarding annually 1,200,000 tons of garbage which is producing 70,000,000 pounds of grease valued at $8,500,000 and 150,000 tons of fertilizer valued at $2,250,000."
National food waste amounted to $65 million, the ad stated.
A great share of this loss is caused by lack of Refrigeration in the home.
One John R. Williams, M.D., had made a lengthy investigation into the relation of family health and proper food preservation in the homes of Rochester, N.Y. He had made this statement before the American Medical Association:
"The temperature of cellars and living rooms in dwelling houses is not sufficiently low during the warm months to protect milk and other perishable foods from rapid bacterial decomposition. Therefore an efficient refrigerator in the home is a necessity."
Every year, the ad went on, 25 million babies were born in America, yet 300,000 of them died in the first 12 months, or six times as many deaths as the total mortality of American troops during the Great War. The copywriter lays this very real carnage at the foot of warm food:
Improper feeding is a principal cause, due to failure to keep the milk properly cooled for the baby in the summer. In one city investigated it was found that the infant mortality was 27 percent in homes where conditions were bad and there were no refrigerators, and only five percent in homes where there were facilities for keeping the food in proper state of preservation.
Insect-borne diseases, doctors with dirty hands, lack of sanitary drinking water and starving mothers don't come up in the refrigerator ad, but I'm almost sold anyway, how about you? All that remained was deciding which model to buy. The Bowser store on Main Street promised more than 25 patterns. Prices went up with the amount of ice a refrigerator was designed to hold.
Hold — not generate.
At the Reliable Furniture Co. on Main Street, prices for Alaska brand cork-filled or Alaska Star refrigerators started with $9.75 for a box that could handle 35 pounds of ice. A three-door "icer" regularly priced at $33.75 was on sale for $27. And a 100-pound box with three doors was on sale for $35.
Arkansas Carpet & Furniture had Alaska refrigerators in a wider range — 11 models, from the 25-pound ice capacity box, which cost $14.50, to the 150-pound box for $77.50.
These refrigerators were still glorified ice buckets. But the electric chill-generating wonders we take for granted were on their way, with less than a decade to come.
Email:
cstorey@arkansasonline.com
Style on 04/01/2019