Ruminations Concerning the 20” Box Fan

[Briar Lee]

A leaky faucet fitting in my annex office building flooded the floor and gave me an excuse to use my 12 gallon shop vac. I also needed a couple of $25 20” box fans which I bought from the nearest Super Big Box Hardware Center and I remembered my mother complaining about having to pay over $10 for one from Sears to replace one her classroom in the late seventies. I remember then, thinking old people (she was in her early fifties) can’t adjust to inflation well.

I’ve bought 20” box fans for well over forty years and I wish they were still ten or fifteen dollars but they are $25. The man at the counter said that I’d just missed a sale where they were $20, but I needed those fans.

My 29 year old son is far better at fixing faucets and much sturdier at wet vacuuming floors. This left me free to set up the fans.

My goodness they’ve improved the 20” box fan. No assembly required. The two recessed legs swing out for the floor and retract for a window mount. The impeller and screens and the blades are all plastic. There’s no handle, but it’s thin enough to just grab it. The cord has a recess in the screen where it stores. Slick as slick gets.

Then I was in a store room and saw another old fan under some boxes.

It had a carefully taped tag on top:

PERSONAL PROPERTY OF MISS LOIS

(Mama was damned proud of her $12 Sears 20” box fan. )

A forty five year old 20” box fan is much heavier than it needs to be. The box is a lot thicker, and stamped from heavier steel. I can remember putting it together for her, attaching the blades to the motor impeller, and attaching the legs.

The switch handle was missing but it was on high, and when I plugged in the cord it worked like it was 1978.

And I was just thinking, when my son is my age I’ll be long gone, but three 20” box fans will likely still be in that store room.

I need to put tags on my two 20” box fans, you know?

 

[didimauw]

I envy the amount of memories and stories you have. My life is so uninteresting compared to yours!

 

[telescopes]

Van has stories. That he does. But what he doesn’t have is a nice meerschaum from the Springfield pipe store sold to him by Charlie Rich that is as nice as the one sold to me by his cousin, Ray Stevens.

 

[Briar Lee]

One more memory

The year my mother bought that fan to replace an old one, her Superintendent at Fair Play schools had taken a new Superintendent position at the much larger Bolivar district and offered my mother a position as a specialist EMH teacher.

She demanded a dollar more than the high school boy’s football coach in pay, her own classroom, and those kids were the only ones she’d have to teach.

I was in college but there were days when I’d pick up my grandmother and drive to Bolivar just to see it.

She had a huge chair, with a half a dozen or so of the least of these, our brethren, dirty and often ragged, all at her feet on the plush carpet.

My 1963 set of World Books was close by. Her own 1939 Required Poems for the Elementary Grades on table by her chair. There were Laura Englis Wilder books, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, so many more (but NEVER DR. SUESS) and Mama’s guitar was cased in the corner.

There was an autistic boy she would have sit on her lap she’d taught to read —-

Still sits the schoolhouse by the road,

A ragged beggar sunning

Around it still the sumachs grow,

And blackberry-vines are creeping.

I will never again see such a wonderful sight of love for the lowly.

And she surely loved dressing up to me Miss Lois.

 

[sablebrush52]

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