No, this is not going to be about the next Polar Vortex that may- or may not- be coming our way. Nor is it about the Serious Action to Protect the Planet that the President may- or may not- talk about in the State of the Union address tomorrow. I was looking at the thermometers outside the kitchen window this morning- 37, and the one nailed to the tree out by where I part the Panzer- 40- a discrepancy between side and front yards that is larger than the claimed temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution.
I will leave a discussion of all that stuff to peer-reviewed science, hahaha. I mean, who would have anticipated that simple observations of the weather would turn into jagged political arguments about the end of the world?
It hasn’t, or rather, it continues to change as it always has.
This was a weekend lost to memories of a half-century ago down on the farm. For those addicted to social media (I am not, I have too many devices and digital enclaves to try to keep up on as it is) there is a vigorous discussion of a couple hundred images I scanned Friday night, and have been struggling to edit ever since. Oh well, it is what it is.
The daunting stack of slide carousels in the garage at Refuge Farm continue to scold me. They are part of a information stream that is being marginalized with each new generation of technology. Like music. Wax discs to wire recorders, to reel to reel tapes to cassettes and then oblivion.
Same deal with the pictures. I got rid of the screen and slide projector when we closed out the house in the Little Village by the Bay, and the only way to view them is to convert to digital.
This weekend I have treated Facebook to thrilling accounts of a visit to West Webster, NY in the later 1950s. A trip Raven and Big Mama took to Bermuda in 1972 as a sort of homage to Grandfather Socotra, who installed the first telephone network on the island a century or more ago. That is worth a story- and speaking of which, there were moving pictures of Grandfather in his solar topee (pith helmet) returning to New Jersey by sea- but I doubt that there is a projector in the family left to show them.
Anyway, that is a long way around the Rose Bush to get to the Deep Freezer saga. This morning I posted a bunch of slides from Raven’s days at Kelvinator Appliances. A bit of background- Raven was recruited to join the American Motors Company out of Ford’s design shop. He worked for the legendary Ed Anderson, head of styling, who did all sorts of amazing things on a shoe string.
One of them was re-tooling the British-designed Metropolitan for George Romney before he sold the estate in Romeo, Michigan (“Skoal Acres”) and retired to Mexico. Ed was replaced as Head of Styling by the talented Dick Teague as George Romney left the company to settle into the long decline to run the State of Michigan and be destroyed in his bid for the Presidency by inadvertently telling the truth about Vietnam.
Not the first time that happened to someone honest in politics, but I digress.
Dick Teague showed no signs of going anywhere, and Raven was an ambitious young man. He participated in all sorts of things to polish his resume- Toastmasters, to improve his public speaking, and Junior Achievement, to show commitment to the community. That was all in addition to the Indian Guides and Scout stuff he did for his kids.
I posted a remarkable portfolio of Disney and other cartoon figures he did for our elementary school fair- an enormous amount of work for something so ephemeral. The images don’t do credit to the size of the works- they were done on brown wrapping paper he got in a giant roll, and produced in a manner similar to Jack Kerouac’s typing “On the Road” on a single long sheet of paper.
Sorry- it is a bit overwhelming, like running into your seven-year-old self at a birthday party with all those people, living and dead.
Anyway, Dick effectively blocked Dad’s upward path in the auto styling game and when the opportunity came, Raven leapt at the chance to take over the Appliance Styling shop at Kelvinator, then a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Motors.
It was an interesting time. We have talked about all that stuff in society writ large in the 1960s. One of the narrower issues that reflected the tumult was Raven’s conception of re-imagining the kitchen. He brought the automobile flair for style to the plain white boxes that were the ovens and refrigerators of the day. You may recall them:
Raven sold a whole new concept up the chain. Why not make the appliances reflect some pizzazz like the automobile side of the company did?
Thus was born the Kelvinator originals, refrigerators and other appliances that coordinated the décor of the kitchen with the rest of the house. Here are a couple samples of what Dad was up to:
The Originals collection caused quite a stir. If they were not exactly psychedelic, they certainly were a demonstration of outside the box thinking, hahaha.
I have a box of images and memos of the Originals someplace, and one of the original jack of Hearts fridges in the garage, with a brass “J” providing the handle. I will get around to restoring it, if entropy doesn’t get me first.
I am confident that this important chapter of the appliance history of America will write itself one of these days. In the meantime, what I found in the boxes of slides was the evolution to the follow-on campaign to the Originals.
See, what they found was that like cars, there had to be something new every year. What came is what is shown in the pictures: the concept drawings turning into the full-sized mockup of something that appears to be a Bachelor Pad right out of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine.
I know Raven liked Playboy- it was always exciting when we found an new issue in his bedside drawer. This concept, if I recall properly, was the Rogue’s Galley.
You can see from the images that there was a dramatic attempt to re-invent everything in the kitchen. The centerpiece was a copper-hooded fireplace, but the slide-out surfaces and artwork-covered freezer compartment are as remarkable today as they were then.
At the end of the series are some very photogenic people captured in the act of hanging out in the Galley. The models went to the big trade shows and demonstrated the thought-leadership of the folks at Kelvinator, and why the kitchen of the future was going to be something really new and really cool.
It did not work out that way. As AMC died, they spun off assets in an attempt to keep the cash-flow going. New Executives from Ford and GM were imported, and their thinking was not innovative enough to keep the lights on.
White Consolidated Industries bought the Kelvinator Brand, and in a management shake-up, consolidated operations in a three story brick factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan. That is what rooted us out of the car culture of suburban Detroit, and started us on the road that eventually wound up in the Little Village by the Bay, where Raven’s last business hurrah was to purchase Curtis Wire Company from its founder and owner, and watch the whole thing go belly up.
He had a great run, Raven did. But I remember powerfully the heady years when he thought he was going to change the way America cooked.
I give you the Rogue’s Galley:
(In the Rogue’s Galley, all the art work covers an appliance. Note the wine-cooler and elegant lines. One of the models is a dead ringer for James Bond. Martini, anyone? All the pics are on Facebook).
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303