How I Convinced My Mother to Buy her First Frigidaire

Many years ago before there were refrigerators, people would put a sign in their kitchen window to tell the ice man how many pounds of ice they needed for the ice box. If you wanted 25 pounds, you put the number 25 on the top of the card. The ice man would bring it in the house and put it in the box. It cost about 20-25 cents a day.

My mother would not buy a new refrigerator because she thought it was too expensive. The Hecht Company had a 6-foot refrigerator on sale for $99.50. The only way I could get Mom to buy the new refrigerator was to prove to her she was spending more money on the ice man than she would on the installments. I was 14 years old at the time.

This was great for me because if the ice man didn't deliver, I had to take my wagon to the ice house to get the ice. It was a ten minute walk to F Street NE.

Mom was very happy with the refrigerator. It kept everything evenly cold. Very few things had to be thrown away. With the ice box, it didn't keep everything cold correctly and you had to throw the food away.

That refrigerator lasted a long time. Eventually, my parents bought another house that had a refrigerator, and gave the first one to my brother Billy and his new wife Anna. After my mother died, my family got the refrigerator. We used it in the basement for a few years before it finally gave out.