HI! this is Splash and I wish I knew her name It is in archives in which I have no interest in pursuing. I do wish I knew her name to at least wave before we approach the next rapids.

She was the young woman chosen to represent one of Bill Reddig’s futuristic concept kitchens during Detroit’s remarkable design boom of the mid-1960s. Sixty years later she still looks optimistic—comfortable in a future that hadn’t happened yet.
She became, without knowing it, the original hostess of what we now call The Rogues’ Galley.
Around here she has acquired a successor named Deirdre, but I like to think they would have gotten along just fine.

My friend Vic’s father, William Edwin Reddig 2, spent his career imagining what tomorrow might look like.

Most people know him for the Kelvinator and AMC kitchens, but his sketchbooks wandered much farther than that. They included futuristic automobiles, compact living spaces, bachelor apartments, entertainment centers, and ideas about how ordinary families might live twenty or thirty years down the road.

Some of the predictions seem wonderfully optimistic.

Others seem surprisingly accurate.

One series imagined urban unrest becoming serious enough that families might someday think differently about personal safety. Another envisioned tiny commuter vehicles beneath bubble canopies, compact enough for crowded cities yet unmistakably optimistic about technology.

Remember, these drawings were done before men had walked on the Moon.

They belonged to an era when Americans believed tomorrow would always be brighter, faster, cleaner, and more exciting than today.

Vic arrived just as that world was beginning.

Born in Detroit at the dawn of the 1950s, he grew up watching his father’s drafting boards fill with ideas about what the twenty-first century might become. Some remained dreams. Others quietly became reality.

That may be why the Rogues’ Galley feels so natural today.

It was never really about a kitchen.

It was about imagining how people would gather, work, cook, laugh, and live together.

Sixty years later, we’re still doing exactly that.

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com