Framed or unframed, desk size to sofa size, printed by us in Arizona and Alabama since 2007. Explore now.
Shorpy is funded by you. Patreon contributors get an ad-free experience.
Learn more.
May 1942. "Washington, D.C. Scrap salvage campaign, Victory Program. 'Old Ironside' is written on this stove found in warehouse of wholesale junk dealer." Photo by Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information. View full size.
If we had a wartime scrap drive today, I suspect we would be in trouble. Our tanks and bullets would have to be made of plastic.
The stove so reminds me of Humpty Dumpty after he fell off the wall!
The fan is a "roller coaster" oscillator. It moves up and down in addition to side to side. They are very rare today and are worth several thousand dollars to collectors. Some rare antique electric fans can go for $15 to $20k. It makes you wonder how many were melted down during the wartime scrap drives.
A lot of stuff was lost to WWII scrap drives - Revolutionary & Civil War cannons from innumerable city parks, statues, plaques, monuments, early locomotives, early ships, untold historical artifacts, even a lot of the big classic cars of the 1930s like Duesenbergs and Pierce-Arrows. Anything and everything made of aluminum, bronze, brass, tin, iron and steel was melted down for the war effort.
It looks as though Ironsides might be saying, "I'm going to sit down and rest for just a minute. Be right with you."
That stove could almost be either an embryonic, primitive robot taking a hard-earned rest, or a small atomic bomb, complete with radiation warning device above the company's name. It is certainly a most striking design.
Ironic in that, the shapes of these Iron stoves in their original form are not so different than the shapes and forms that many of them were probably melted into, during their process of transformation, that started with their collection for the Victory Program, and ended in the various munitions that required such shapes.
Ironic Indeed.
Sorry, I couldn't help it. I just saw the puns lying there hours ago, and nobody had posted anything yet. So I decided to do so based upon that being the first thing that came to mind in seeing the shapes in this image.
That stove was manufactured in my hometown. I've read in several locations that it was the largest stove factory in the world at points in time. The factory itself sat on land that was part of the Newark Earthwork Complex, and was razed in 2010.
More deaths on the railroads of yesteryear were caused by this thing than by anything else.
On Shorpy:
Today’s Top 5