The Ice Box with some Ephemera

Speaking of ice and snow, as we were a couple of days ago, I overheard Emeril use the word “icebox” on his TV show the other night. And I had to wonder how many people knew that he was referring to the refrigerator, and of those who did, how many actually knew what an icebox is – or was. And of those who knew, how many had ever had to live with one.

With the kind of serendipity that often befalls an ephemera dealer, the very next day I turned up this advertising piece for an ice delivery company in San Francisco.



It was clearly made to hang next to the icebox, an early version of the advertising refrigerator magnet. The verso of it shows how to place the ice, and where in the box to put various food items. This piece was probably produced at about the time that electric (and gas) refrigerators were being introduced, since the slogan is, “A Block of Ice Never Gets Out of Order.”

That may be, but if you ever lived with an icebox, you must remember the “drip tray.”
“Drip” is a nice term for all that melted water. Now, it may be that the icebox in this image had some kind of draining device, but the one we had when I was a kid had a sheet metal tray under it that had to be pulled out and emptied.

That ice tray pretty much controlled our lives. Trips and visits were often cut short with the phrase from my mother’s lips, “Oh, we have to get home and empty the drip tray.” There were a few times that we didn’t get there in time – we’d walk in to find a stream of cold slimy water inching its way across the cracked linoleum floor.

Removing a full tray was no fun, either, as you can imagine if you have ever tried to pry a flat wobbly tray brimming with water out of a floor-level hole, and balance and lift it to the sink. A deal of bailing had to be performed before the task could be undertaken with some degree of success. Our icebox was nothing like the luxury model in the above image. It was a low box with one compartment and a couple of wire shelves. A block of ice went into the bottom of the box, and a limited amount of food could be placed on the shelves. The only advantage to having to live with such a contraption was that it couldn’t keep things frozen. The other phrase from this era that comes to mind is, “We have to eat up all this ice cream, because it won’t hold in the icebox.”

The ice was made, I knew, in the ice house that we sometimes walked past on the way to the park. It was a huge warehouse building, rather formidable and scary with unpainted wooden steps and landings and, when the doors were open, a huge dark cavern was revealed. The whole building exhaled cold and damp. In fact, everything about it seemed to be wet all of the time – the walls, the loading decks, the ramps, the parking lot. The men who worked there were big and burly and aproned in heavy leather and … well, wet. It had to be a rather nice job in summer, since air conditioning was not yet common in our part of the country.

It’s no wonder that I dearly love my self-defrosting refrigerator, with the freezer on the side and the ice dispenser in the door. It has to be one of the modern age’s most wonderful inventions, and I make no excuses when I am caught hugging it with deep affection.