The old and the new

by Otto Ringle

Although Fred Wolf invented the refrigerator in 1913 and freon was introduced about 10 years later, I vividly remember in the early 1940s Joe O’Connor traipsing through our living room carrying a block of ice in his ice-tongs — dripping water all over mom’s rugs in order to get to our old ice box, which was in the kitchen on the other side of the living room. Joe would do this on a weekly basis, as one block of ice would last about that long.

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