Vintage appliances

 

My mother would be hard pressed to locate an instruction manual of something she purchased last month.  A., shall we say, is a bit different.  He keeps all of the manuals to everything he's every purchased, neatly of course, and all in one place.

In fact, he keeps manuals to things that he didn't even buy.  Yes, that's right!  When we recently cleaned out all of the kitchen drawers prior to the renovation, we unearthed manuals and installation instructions for the major appliances—manuals that are so old and so wonderful I just have to share them here.

A. thinks his kitchen was last renovated in the early 1980s, well before he bought it.  That may be true, but the appliances seem to have been even older than that.  The stove certainly looked dated...

 

But check out the instruction manual:

Look at the food styling!  Look at the font!  That can't be from the early '80s.  Maybe the '60s?  I love the fake daisies stuck into the meat.  Centerpiece, main dish...why choose?

And here's the Magic Chef dishwasher:

What era was this?  Look at her hairdo!

There isn't a single date on any of these manuals, but they seem much older than 1980 to me.  The amazing thing is that they mostly worked: the dishwasher cranked away when, on occasion, we asked it too; the fridge hummed reliably (if inefficiently) day in and day out; and the stove offered three working burners, provided you had a pair of pliers to get around a broken knob.  Which is pretty good, I think—will the current crop of appliances last thirty or fifty years?  Somehow I doubt it.