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- Baldwin 62303
- Baldwin VO-1000
- Cold
- No expense spared
- Tough Guys
- Lost in Toyland
- And without gloves
- If I were a blindfolded time traveler
- Smoke Consumer Also Cooks
- Oh that stove!
- Possibly still there?
- What?!?
- $100 Reward
- Freeze Frame
- Texas Flyer wanted
- Just a Year Too Soon
- WWII -- Replacing men with women at the railroad crossing.
- Yes, Icing
- You kids drive me nuts!
- NOT An Easy Job
- I wonder
- Just add window boxes
- Icing Platform?
- Indiana Harbor Belt abides
- Freezing haze
- Corrections (for those who care)
- C&NW at Nelson
- Fallen Flags
- A dangerous job made worse
- Water Stop
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Burned Out: 1942
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.
A scrap drive today
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.
Cracked
The stove so reminds me of Humpty Dumpty after he fell off the wall!
Fan of Fans
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.
Stoves weren't the only thing
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.
Old Ironsides
It looks as though Ironsides might be saying, "I'm going to sit down and rest for just a minute. Be right with you."
Been on its legs all day
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.
Irony
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.
Wehrle Factory
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.
Good!
More deaths on the railroads of yesteryear were caused by this thing than by anything else.
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