In the Kitchen
Nothing was more characteristic of the new era than our post-war kitchens. Had a time-traveler walked into one, s/he would have had no doubt - this was the 1950s.
Don't YOU always dress to match the seat cushions?
1952 Formica demonstration kitchen
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OK, so they can't spell "refrigerator."
(from ad by the builder of Ron's family home in Hicksville)
New York Daily News March 3, 1951
My family home's kitchen wasn't as grandiose as the one above, but it did have a linoleum floor, knotty pine cabinets with faux wrought-iron hardware, curvy/pointy moldings, Formica counters with metal edges, matching Formica backsplash behind the counters, and a porcelain sink like the one in the photo.
Note that the flower pot is positioned to help distract the viewer from the electric range, and that we cannot see the refrigerator - mixing white appliances with knotty pine and 1950s colors was not to everyone's taste.
Before talking about appliances, let's mention the "elephant in the room." It wasn't really in the kitchen; it was in the living room, and it wasn't an elephant; it was a TV. Even without colors, television was proving effective at "helping us decide what we wanted". Maybe our family's 8½ cubic foot refrigerator wasn't big enough, and our parents wanted to try squeezing a larger one into our kitchen.
What sizes did this year's fridges come in, and what kind of features did they have? There were newspaper ads, of course, but television commercials seemed more informative. They showed you how things worked, because, say, Betty Furness demonstrated them.
A one-time actress, Furness was an early TV "celebrity" spokesperson. It had been more than a decade since she appeared in a real movie, but people knew her name. More important to Westinghouse, her employer, was that television viewers listened to her, and responded by going out and buying Westinghouse products. The more she did it, the more the viewers trusted her.
Betty Furness on the job
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Of course our parents knew that advertising was biased, but so what? It was a new era. People had never owned post-war appliances before; who could know which ones would last and which would fail? If Betty Furness showed you that you could get features you liked, why not buy a Westinghouse?
1952 Birds Eye magazine advertisement
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1955 magazine ad for Snow Crop Lemonade
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Whatever cold appliance - sometimes our parents still called it an "ice box" - graced our kitchen, inside it was something never before eaten on a grand scale by humans: frozen edible matter. In theory, frozen food had existed for many decades, but it invariably meant miserable, soggy meals with no flavor. The 1920s saw a breakthrough - a Brooklynite named Clarence Birdseye invented a quick-freeze process, and frozen foods started to get better. It would take a long time to make proper commercial freezing equipment, and to overcome public skepticism.
In 1945, the war (always the war,the war...) had left manufacturers with access to plenty of aluminum, but with few uses for it. Ecological impacts were not a concern, and it was not long until someone discovered the most significant scientific formula of the 1950s:
Frozen Food + Disposable Aluminum Tray = TV Dinner
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Meanwhile, our parents' kitchens accrued more electric gadgets: blenders, hand-held mixers, rotisseries, percolators, frying pans, griddles, even pressure cookers. I doubt that - to use the phrase from the earlier ad - "Mom's chores" got any better, but because of all the electrical doodads, the occasional LILCO power outages (e.g., during hurricanes) had a bigger impact in the kitchen than they might have had otherwise.
Osrow Infra-Red Defroster
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One of my regular childhood chores was helping my mother defrost the freezer part of the fridge. I always expected it to be fun, and it never was. It was messy; water would get everywhere. The first step after turning off the fridge was to empty the contents, and wrap them in multiple layers of newspaper to keep them cold while the freezer defrosted. Keeping the dog and cat away was essential.
Although we bought defrosting tools, similar to the one shown above, they never helped much. We had to pry off the ice as it softened, and sponge up the water that gathered in the bottom of the fridge. Some water always collected in some hidden spot until it decided to cascade out onto the kitchen floor.
My parents soon bought a new "Self Defrost" refrigerator. When ice built up, you simply pressed a button, something inside heated up, and the ice quickly melted into a tray at the bottom of the unit. Amazing.
After several months, the new refrigerator developed a strange aroma - not the food in it, but the appliance itself. It was as if the odor came from inside its walls, and it did. The "Self Defrost" wiring had ignited the insulation within the sides of the fridge, and it began to smolder. On the shiny white outside, tan blotches began to grow, as the paint got singed from the heat below the surface. The refrigerator literally "was toast" - it was not a Westinghouse; maybe my parents should have listened to Betty Furness.
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That's the end of Part I. Next month, we'll look back on the rest of our journey to the summer of 1964.
We were the ones in school, but our parents learned alongside us in those years. There always were new things in the news, like inflation, satellites, and transistors, and new people, too, like Gagarin, Khrushchev, Clay, and King. Places we'd known only as dots on a map acquired new, and sometimes very personal, meanings for us, as we'd hear about Suez, Berlin, Vietnam, and Dallas.
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