You can tell that my father was obviously a man of much taste until or unless it came to replacing a toaster. Me, I would have preferred the classic Sunbeam T-35 "Radiant Control" toaster . . . the cross-slit model into which you simply placed your bread and voila! it descended automatically and arose slowly, bringing up the most perfect toast, bar none.
Cases in point:
---They got an original GE swivel-top vacuum cleaner as a wedding present. The monster plotzed in 1962 . . . bingo! Dad replaces it with an Electrolux Model F. It probably lasted well enough beyond 1973, when my mother---about to remarry (she was widowed)---swapped it for the first (blue) of the Lux square-tank restylings, a machine that lasted until the day my stepfather died in 2003.
P.S. I did mean monster---in plain English, that 1950 swiveltop was a first class piece of crapola; of course, I'm biased . . . I fell in love with my grandmother's original Hoover Constellation, the swiveltop of 1952 . . . any kid who didn't love a vacuum cleaner that resembled the planet Saturn was missing something upstairs . . . and by the way, they're making the Connie again . . .
---They got a horrid GE "Triple-Whip" kitchen mixer . . . horrid performer, horrid racket, horrid pretentiousness (its three beaters never did half what a good Mixmaster pair would get you), you name it. Tolerated it until she burned out at last in 1962. Bingo! Replacement: Sunbeam Mixmaster Model 12C. The last of the classics. On which yours truly also happened to have learnt to cook . . . and she lasted until I learnt the hard way what my mother never thought of doing with her, namely lubing her regularly (two drops of 3-in-1 oil in the appropriate tiny motor holes would have done it), and the poor girl seized on me smack dab in the middle of a carrot cake. (I got 12C---or, the Mixerbird, as I called her as a kid, since when you twisted the speed dial to fourth speed the tail fins made the machines profile resemble the profile of the original Thunderbird---after my mother died in 1991, since my stepfather knew about as much about cooking and baking as I know about animal husbandry . . . )
(That'll be Model 12C on the right, showing obvious class over that putrid chrome-version Brady Bunch Mixmaster on the left . . . )
