“Make it an Electrical Christmas” Remembering appliances from long ago
Just in Time local history series
It’s a snowy Christmas Day in Lindsay some 65 years ago. Parcels have long since been opened, and supper preparations are well underway. From the kitchen of a brick bungalow somewhere in one of the town’s suburban neighbourhoods wafts the aroma of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and apple pie. A new ivory-coloured General Electric oven purchased the previous holiday season has cooked this festive repast, while in the adjacent canary yellow (or turquoise) Kelvinator fridge, cabbage and jellied salads are chilling, waiting to be served. Sitting in the orange-carpeted living room is a brand-new RCA Victor television set — a technological marvel that will surely give the old tube radio on the opposite side of the room a run for its money. Tuned to Channel 12, CHEX, the TV will, after some twiddling of the dial, be aglow with such programs as Howdy Doody, Disneyland and The Other Wise Man.
Four years ago in these pages, I wrote about how electric lighting enhanced the holiday season in this area during the early 20th century. By the 1950s, electrical appliances such as those described above were working their magic in many households across the community. Utilitarian though they were, these refrigerators, stoves, televisions and radios were cultural touchstones for those who grew up during the age of postwar prosperity and the rise of the newly named “middle class.”
Among the earliest appliance shops to appear in Lindsay was J. Morley Greaves, established in October 1927. Within two decades, his business had relocated to 130 Kent St. W. and by the late 1940s had become the town’s only authorized dealer in General Electric home appliances. “It has been the objective of this firm to progress with the times, and as electrical appliances of proven merit came on the market, they were usually to be found in this store,” its proprietors wrote in ad copy in 1948.
Five years after Greaves opened his doors, a young entrepreneur named Earl Kennedy began repairing radios and eventually expanded into other appliances. “In 1948, the Government of Ontario instructed Ontario Hydro to change the electrical supply from 25 cycles to 60 cycles to increase efficiencies,” note Earl’s sons, Dale and Garry Kennedy in an interview. “Old 25 cycle appliances were upgraded at the expense of the government and the demand for new appliances exploded.”
A slew of stores and repairmen specializing in small appliances helped meet the demand over the course of the next decade. While Morley Greaves and Earl Kennedy expanded their respective product lines, Court’s Music and Appliance Centre at 169 Kent St. dealt in Admiral refrigerators, and George Williamson Radio-Electric at 47 Kent urged customers to take a closer look at “the new Automatic Westinghouse Roaster Oven,” among other gadgets. Meanwhile, tinkerers such as George L. Nokes, Fred Smith and Lawrence Windrem got in on the act and fixed many a radio and oven.
During the 1950s, advertising campaigns for appliances — especially those associated with meal preparation — tended to capitalize on traditional gender roles. “Make it An Electrical Christmas — Plug into years of new leisure for Mom with a Super ‘High Voltage’ gift that will ‘charge’ her Yuletide with pleasure!” exclaimed one of George Williamson’s ads in 1952. Among the “super gifts to make her burdens lighter” were turnover toasters (which heated bread more evenly) and automatic sandwich grills finished in chrome. Also wooing homemakers ahead of the 1952 Christmas season was a lavishly illustrated advertisement from Kennedy’s in which a woman added yet another pie to an oven almost filled to capacity. “Bake for your biggest holiday crowd in the giant oven of this ‘small-kitchen’ model!” trumpeted the copywriter. (While many sales campaigns were developed in-house, the major manufacturers occasionally supplied dealers with unusual promotional materials: the Kennedy brothers remember handing out cardboard crowns provided by Frigidaire at the Lindsay fair.)
Despite the proliferation of electrical appliances promising a better life for consumers across Victoria County seven decades ago, not every household had the option of purchasing them. Some families might have had an icebox stocked by an iceman in the days prior to electrical refrigeration, but this was not a given everywhere.
“My family never had an icebox, because there was a back porch on the house that wasn’t heated that we could use for storage during the winter,” recalls Lila Hart, who grew up on a farm near Bobcaygeon. “We didn’t get a modern refrigerator at home until around 1959, because the house had no electricity before that.” This lack of electricity meant as well that the radio Hart and her family listened to after the war had to operate on battery power. “It was about the size of a bread box, maybe a little deeper because the battery sat in the back,” Hart remembers.
It is easy for us to take appliances for granted today when the pace of technological change has been so rapid. Ninety years after 16-year-old Earl Kennedy began puttering on radios, the business now owned and operated by his grandson Zack has embraced the latest and greatest in refrigerators, ranges, and electronics. Despite the passage of history, our relationship with appliances still reaches its apotheosis during the festive season when we take Christmas dinner out of the oven and gather around the TV to watch that time-honoured holiday special.
