March 16, 2016 Wednesday)
When Wanda and I married, we lived in a two-room furnished apartment. We soon moved onto a church field where we were provided a parsonage next door to the church house. We had no furniture of our own, so some of the folks gave us stuff they didn’t need any more, others loaned things to us until we could afford our own, and still other businesses in town rented items to us, among which was a gas range. We managed to make payments on the range and it became our own. When we moved to Fort Worth, we took it with us to our rented house near the seminary. Later we moved to Briar where we lived out in the country in a nice little rented house. The stove went with us.
One day Wanda was preparing supper and I was sitting in the living room when I heard a “whoof” and a little “boom.” The room seemed to shake a tiny bit. I jumped up and ran to the door of the kitchen and found Wanda standing in front of the stove, hair singed, holding a burnt match at eye level, staring at me with a slight smile that seemed to ask, “What happened?” That was the end of the stove we had used for four or five years. The next day we went to Leonard Brothers Department Store in Fort Worth and bought a new O’Keefe and Merritt gas range with nothing down and years to pay.
We enjoyed that stove at Briar, at Kosse, in Dallas, and at Rockport for 13 years until we moved to Oak Terrace to this house where there was already a built-in electric range. We replaced that range once and replaced the replacement with a gas range we have had now for a number of years. We still have the refrigerator we bought in 1970, 46 years ago, and it works well. My son-in-law laughed when he saw the brand names of the range and refrigerator. The fridge is a “Hotpoint” and the stove is a “Frigidaire.” How times do change.
I guess our favorite range was the O’Keefe and Merritt, because it had a griddle between the burners on either side of the top, and a rotisserie in a separate chamber to the left of the oven. Wanda cooked many pancakes and lots of bacon on the griddle and hundreds of whole chickens on the rotisserie, which was electric, though the burners and oven used gas. We made the change from gas to butane and back to gas again during the years we used it. It was truly a beautiful appliance. I saw on the internet today that there is a business these days that restores those old stoves as antiques that can still be usable. (click here).