"My wife and I own a Toastmaster Automatic
Popup Model 1B14, which was made by the McGraw Electric Company in the
late 1940s or early 1950s. We got it with the camp we bought in eastern
Maine nearly two decades ago. It makes toast. Perfectly. Every time. You
put in two pieces of bread. You press the Bakelite handle down. The
toast pops up less than three minutes later, and the bread is crisply
and evenly browned on both sides. Apparently it's been doing this for longer than I've been alive. This strikes me as a small miracle, given that every new toaster I've
ever bought has been flawed in one or more ways: striated toasting,
requirement of repeated down-clicks, passive-aggressive rebellion
against the repeated down-clicks, far too much standing around and
fingertip drumming. And still these often make toast that somehow fails
to match the replicable standard of being crispy on the outside and
pliable on the inside. Also, the new toasters that I buy invariably stop
working after a few years, and require replacement. I understand we are
in a golden age of technology, yet it appears we've lost the ability to produce machines that can consistently make toast.
"There are other things at our camp that impress me similarly - our place is essentially a museum of Darwinian technology. Anything that failed was discarded, and items that have proven themselves over the past half century remain. (Also, a camp year is approximately four months, so things wear out less rapidly.) Our electric range, I'm guessing, dates to the late 1950s, the outboard engine to the early 1970s, and the avocado-green rotary-dial phone in the kitchen is clearly mid-1970s. All work just fine. The cherry-red living room carpet was likely installed in the 1960s, yet it has not faded where the sun hits it. The carpet probably should be in the Smithsonian, an artifact of when America knew how to make synthetics that can last forever yet still offer comfort when the shirtless choose to repose on the floor on a warm afternoon.
"We bought our camp in Maine's Washington County for many of the reasons people buy camps. That is, to have a place to get away when the weather is warm, a place so quiet you can hear moose crashing through the underbrush on the ridge above, or a squally wind rising in the pines a mile away down the lake. When we bought it, it seemed a matter of simple geography, of finding a place with less pavement than soil, with more quadrupeds than bipeds.
"But after 20 summers, I've come to realize that the essence of a camp is more complicated than that. A summer camp is not about place. It's about time."
Although this article, published last summer in Yankee magazine, focused on the blessing (my word, not the author's) of a place to get away during the summer, it offered any interesting perspective on some of the "new and improved" items that have been offered to American consumers over the past several years - a perspective in which those of us of a certain age may find a bit of truth.
To access the complete Yankee article, please visit:
Yankee: A Place to Get Away | Maine Summer Camp (2017)
"There are other things at our camp that impress me similarly - our place is essentially a museum of Darwinian technology. Anything that failed was discarded, and items that have proven themselves over the past half century remain. (Also, a camp year is approximately four months, so things wear out less rapidly.) Our electric range, I'm guessing, dates to the late 1950s, the outboard engine to the early 1970s, and the avocado-green rotary-dial phone in the kitchen is clearly mid-1970s. All work just fine. The cherry-red living room carpet was likely installed in the 1960s, yet it has not faded where the sun hits it. The carpet probably should be in the Smithsonian, an artifact of when America knew how to make synthetics that can last forever yet still offer comfort when the shirtless choose to repose on the floor on a warm afternoon.
"We bought our camp in Maine's Washington County for many of the reasons people buy camps. That is, to have a place to get away when the weather is warm, a place so quiet you can hear moose crashing through the underbrush on the ridge above, or a squally wind rising in the pines a mile away down the lake. When we bought it, it seemed a matter of simple geography, of finding a place with less pavement than soil, with more quadrupeds than bipeds.
"But after 20 summers, I've come to realize that the essence of a camp is more complicated than that. A summer camp is not about place. It's about time."
Although this article, published last summer in Yankee magazine, focused on the blessing (my word, not the author's) of a place to get away during the summer, it offered any interesting perspective on some of the "new and improved" items that have been offered to American consumers over the past several years - a perspective in which those of us of a certain age may find a bit of truth.
To access the complete Yankee article, please visit:
Yankee: A Place to Get Away | Maine Summer Camp (2017)
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