Thread Number: 71720
/ Tag: Classified Ad Finds
1947 L&H Electric Range |
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Post# 949022   7/19/2017 at 22:32 (2,444 days old) by gansky1 (Omaha, The Home of the TV Dinner!)   |   | |
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Post# 950275 , Reply# 1   7/27/2017 at 11:50 (2,436 days old) by bajaespuma (Connecticut)   |   | |
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These Wisconsin folks also made gas appliances and custom built-in refrigerators at some point in their history.
My uncle and his partner inherited a beautiful vintage kitchen that was in an ancient Dutch stone house in the Hudson Valley that they bought in 1965. My sister and I just sold the house a year ago when he died, which gives you an idea of time span. The kichen had in it turquoise wooden cabinets, a original red and white gingham formica countertop complete with chrome trim on all the edges, a GE top freezer unit with the half-moon lazy-susan shelves(the ones I see on ebay all the time now) and and L&H stainless wall oven (with the waffle-iron nichrome coil elements) and two separate 2-burner L&H cooktop units with thick coils.
I can't begin to describe the meals that were prepared on those L&H appliances. 17 years after they bought the house, they built a new kitchen on the ground floor. The GE fridge and the turquoise cabinets were tossed, but they brought the L&H oven and one of the cooktops down to the new kitchen and used them for 40 more years. The two-burner cooktop was used all the time because when they built the new kitchen they decided to buy one of those Corning stove with the smooth glass top. It was essentialy a GM Frigidaire stove with a corning cooktop built in so the oven, which broke before the L&H ever did, worked beautifully while it functioned, but the nitwits finally had to admit they made a mistake with that stove because they grew tired of the stove's 4 slow, unresponsive, hard-to-clean and breakdown-prone burners.
In hindsight, I'm sure they chose that stove because it was beautiful to look at with clean architectural lines and visually fit perfectly into the clean lines of their new kitchen. I was unpleasantly surprised they chose such a "Debbie 'n' Bob" stove because I always thought that my uncle's partner, Dick, who was a talented cook would have chosen gas, but neither of them wanted to deal with propane, so Dick decided to pretend that he was James Beard and went with an all-electric kitchen. I can attest to the fact that many of the best cooks I have known learned how to coax delicious cooked food from electric stoves.
The point of this long-winded story is that not only were the L&H appliances designed with classic, timeless exteriors, but they performed like champs and lasted more than 60 years. The oven finally gave out in 2010, but , for all I know, that 2-burner unit is still working. I guess that's why L&H went out of business in the end. |