When I was a teenager, my mom had a kitchen with blue Formica counters and coppertone appliances, similar to the ones above. The cabinets were knotty pine. She put yellow gingham curtains in the kitchen window, which I realize now was just the right homey touch; she had a knack for that sort of thing. See the entire 1957 American Kitchens catalog here.
Your Head Trucker is taking a break from political blogging to clear his head. It's better for me to tend to our quiet life in this little bungalow instead of repeating all the outrage and uproar of the big world outside, which I can do nothing about.
In this video, Kevin shows and tells us about a wide range of kitchen gadgets, most of which I remember from my mother's and grandmother's kitchens. The camera work is a bit wobbly, but it's all fascinating if you enjoy cooking.
Bonus: Here's an array of useful gadgets from the 1940 Sears catalog, the rest of which you can browse through yourself at Catalogs & Wishbooks, a wonderful website full of more than 300 old catalogs from various mail-order stores.
N.B. - for equivalent prices in today's money, multiply by about 20. See Measuring Worth for more conversion factors.
Your Head Trucker often enjoys browsing through old house plan books over at the Internet Archive. Here's one of my favorite plans: the Lexington, a lovely colonial offered by Sears and Roebuck from 1927 to 1933. Even M.P., whose architectural tastes incline to the hobbity, admires the beauty of it.
Sears Lexingtton on the cover of the 1928 Sears Modern Homes catalog. Click to enlarge.
Sears Lexington, 1929, which was a revision of an earlier model.
Specifications and options for the 1929 model.
Sears Lexington from the 1932 catalog, showing an actual photograph of this model as built.
As everyone knows by now, I suppose, Sears, Wards, and other companies offered pre-cut materials to build houses in the first decades of the 20th century, as well as heating, plumbing, and electrical systems. Those houses ranged from tiny cottages to almost-mansions, in all the popular styles of the era.
The Lexington was one of the high-end models; to that $4000 price tag for pre-cut lumber and materials (windows, doors, nails, paint, flooring, mouldings, etc.), add about $1500 for all utitilies and necessary options like window screens and asphalt roof shingles, as well as who knows how much for the lot to build it on and the cost of excavating a basement, plus bricks and cement (not supplied by Sears), and carpenter's wages for whatever work you didn't do yourself.
So the total cost might have been around $8000 - equivalent to $144,000 today, according to Measuring Worth. This for a 36 x 26 floor plan, for a total of 1,872 square feet. And that's just for the house, not including furniture and appliances, nor landscaping nor even a garage for your Pierce-Arrow.
But of course most people bought much less expensive homes. The whole idea of the pre-cut, "mail-order" houses was to get a low-cost, well-built home that you could put up yourself, or, as many people did, hire a carpenter to erect it. A great idea in its time, and makes for fascinating reading today. If you're interested in that sort of thing, check out the Wikipedia article on "kit homes" here.
Bonus: Thousands of Sears homes are still standing and much loved today by happy homeowners. Here's a Lexington in Washington, D. C., that occupies its own triangular block. The plan is reversed from that shown in the catalog, an easy change. Some owner screened and expanded the side porch, and cleverly added a basement-level garage below. The house appears to be well kept, but looks rather bleak in a monochrome paint scheme, stripped of its colonial shutters. Why are modern people so afraid of color?
In the 1920's, Spanish-style homes were much in vogue and were built in all parts of the country, though they seem most appropriate in warm-climate states that were originally colonized by the Spanish, such as Florida, Texas, and California. These homes were designed in all sizes, but today I will show you just two smallish ones, offered as ready-cut houses by Sears and Montgomery Ward. If you had to pick one to live in, which would you choose?
(Click to enlarge any picture; then from the lightbox, right-click to open a really big image.)
Wards, 1930:
Sears, 1928:
Above is a Google Maps image of a Sears San Jose in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Unusually, it was built with brick veneer instead of the customary stucco. M.P. thinks the short, closed-off tower is stupid and looks ridiculous; I think it's distinctive. What do you think?
You can see more exterior and interior pics of this San Jose as well as others from around the country at Sears House Seeker.
A well-plotted, well-acted little drama that is a cut above the usual promotional film. In March 1956, American appliance makers and electric power companies united in a marketing campaign to promote "all-electric" homes chock full of comforts and conveniences - and why not? The phrase the American dream was not yet in common parlance - but the American standard of living was the envy of all the world.
The long, grim years of depression and war were a fading memory, the postwar economy was booming, and new electric generating plants were being built all over the country. The idea of an energy shortage was unheard-of, much less the bizarre notion of global warming. The future was not only bright, it was here now! And increasingly affordable for everyone.
The producer, John Sutherland, was a man of many talents who started out as an animator and voiced the adult Bambi in Disney's 1942 film of the same name. All of the cast were seasoned actors; you can find biographies of most of them on Wikipedia. Of special interest to us baby boomers with long memories are Michael Winkelman, who went on to play Little Luke McCoy, Walter Brennan's TV grandson, on The Real McCoys from 1957 to 1963.
And big sister should look familiar too: she's Sheila James, who played the brash, brainy Zelda on Dobie Gillis from 1959 to 1963. Later, using her real last name of Kuehl, Sheila went on to earn a law degree from Harvard and became the first out lesbian to be elected to the California state legislature, where she served for fourteen years, and is currently a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
Related: I noted with a little sigh last week that the mighty Sears and Roebucks has gone bust, after more than a century of renown. Another icon of a vanishing America gone. Without researching the question, I suppose its decline began with the rise of discount department stores in the early 1960s - first K-Mart and the like, then Walmart, then all the big-box stores that dot today's landscape. And then the Internet, which is the modern-day equivalent of the Sears Catalogue and its cornucopia of merchandise for sale.
Probably no one under 50 can remember when the Sears store was the heart of every downtown, and everybody went to Sears for all kinds of goods - just about anything you needed. And of course that's where you went every Christmas to tell Santa what you wanted, and had your picture taken sitting on his lap. If your town didn't have a Sears and Roebucks, you were really living in Podunk.
But Sears has been mismanaged for the last fifty years at least - when their market share declined in the 1970s and 1980s, they reacted by trying to be all things to all people, stupidly opening insurance counters and stockbroking counters and other goofy stuff that had no business in a department store. Finally, I think it was taken over by people who just wanted to squeeze out all the profit out that they could and the public be damned. Well, that's business in America, isn't it? All too often, I mean.
I am no businessman, but it seems to me they should have concentrated on what they did best - Sears sold ugly clothing and mediocre electronics, but it was always the go-to place for Craftsman tools and Kenmore appliances, which were all top quality. Well managed, those two things should have made a perpetual profit, even if they had let everything else go.
Anyway, that's all water under the bridge now. But for those who, like your Head Trucker, enjoy some juicy kitchen porn, here is a link to the Sears 1958 Kitchen Book, with color pictures and all you need to know to modernize and beautify your plain, dull kitchen. Have fun.
Your Head Trucker is not ashamed to admit he is queer for floor plans, especially old houses like the ones Sears and Roebuck used to sell by mail order. Sometimes I'll take an old plan like these and redraw them on my Home Designer software, updating just a little bit around the edges. Like I did all weekend. Hey, it keeps me off the streets.
Anyway, just sharing a really cool site I found: Sears itself has an (incomplete) archive of their old house plans, which I had a blast looking through. Check it out for groovy old homes like these:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
