The Early Adopter

In 1953, upon the birth of my baby sister, our family moved from the apartment above the Dahl House to a new house on the west side of Drury Ave, next to Middents' and kitty-corner from my grandmother’s. The financing for the new house came from the Veterans Administration, my father being deemed a poor risk by Lowry State Bank. My father’s family had resided and owned the hardware business in Lowry since 1916; his uncle owned a thriving Lumber Yard; 4 Hoplin boys had served in the US Navy in WW II - but I guess surviving the depression bank closures made Iver risk averse. As a last resort, the VA came up with $8000 at 3% - highway robbery.  

Dad had done a lot of work with contractor Emil Pearson from Elbow Lake. Emil's crew built the new house @ 249 Drury Avenue in classic post-war architecture, 1½ stories with a roof pitch that limited the upstairs to 2 bedrooms + a ½ bath, but plenty of linen closet space in the hallway between the bedrooms and storage space under the eaves. The south bedroom was my very own, a place to retreat to with my books, baseball cards and APBA. The room had windows to the south that turned it into a steam room in the summer. Air conditioning consisted of an oscillating fan in the window.  

The main floor had a large room off the kitchen that served as living and dining room. There was a large picture window on each side of the front entry.  We only ate in the “dining room” when we had “company”. Normally meals were in the rather cramped kitchen at a classic chrome tube and formica table. The kitchen was circled by soffits and my Swedish mother had them painted in red script - “Välkommen till vårt bord” and “Giv oss i dag vårt dalig bröd”. The back entry off the kitchen was larger than the front entry to accommodate boots, coat hooks and the upright freezer holding the vanilla ice cream.

Left-handed gun

The living / dining room floor had dark green linoleum and wallpaper in floral horrendous. But the dining room did hold a prized Duncan Phyfe table and chairs.

By 1957, the living room had been decorated with a Setchel Carlson TV in the corner.  In ‘57 every TV was American made. My father served 3+ years in the Navy in the Pacific in WWII and held a life-long antipathy to all things Japanese. I once bought a Honda vehicle and it was reviewed with stony silence. In the 80’s, he bought a new TV - a Curtis-Mathis. It was the only American television maker left.

In the computer business, a customer who is willing to take a chance on early edition products is called an “early adopter” and the success or failure of a product, and even a company, may hinge on how well their adoption fares and whether they are willing to speak well of their experience. This term also is applied to those, usually young males, who must have the latest electronic gadget, whether phone, tablet or video game. I appreciate clever and useful gadgets as much as anyone, although I generally fall in the “early majority” category. I have a Mac, an iPad, an iPhone, a Chromebook, an old Windows 8 laptop and Apple TV - excessive, do you think?

My father was definitely an early adopter, but in a different realm and era. Many of his adoptions were to test advancements in his field of business - hardware, plumbing, heating, electrical.  He was one of the first to replace cast iron soil pipe with PVC, to use bakelite electrical boxes instead of steel and he had a book on research around possible improvements to the toilet - splash patterns and such. He led the effort to design the Lowry sewage treatment "holding ponds" employing the gravity of Hedlin's hill south of town; getting natural gas lines in place in Lowry and converting furnaces to its use, and on and on.

One of his great pleasures was to get into the basement of buildings to check out the mechanical, be it the "Ralph" in Grand Forks, Si Melby Hall, Central Lutheran, a McMansion or the Notre Dame Golden Dome.

In the home improvement area, my mother was the unwitting assistant in many of these experiments.  She would occasionally return home to find her house had been “modified” without consultation.  

One time she found her refrigerator was gone, replaced by a lovely "harvest tone" wall-hanging refrigerator, designed to eliminate the bending associated with your upright models. But you had to have a kitchen that could accommodate what, in space terms, was the equivalent of another set of kitchen cabinetry. In our small kitchen it took up a wall and was just the right height for the corner to align with my forehead. However, this unit eventually found its way into the perfect home and is still in operation 50 years later. They don’t make appliances like they used to.

Many appliance innovations were first tested in Hoplin household - flat top ranges, various types of refrigerators. But no dishwasher - kids needed chores. My father was convinced the trash compactor was going to be a winner. I think this thought was rooted in WWII conservation practices where everyone cut the ends off tin cans and flattened them for the war effort. But there weren’t many people who were willing to invest in a device that produced cubes of trash ala the junkyard car smasher.

And we had an incinerator in our basement! All burnable trash went up the chimney. Between that and the compactor, who needs a garbage truck. We also had the first built-in vacuum in the county and perhaps in all of rural Minnesota. Throw away that "Hoover", replaced by outlets in the wall you could plug a hose into and the dirt mysteriously zoomed to the Twilight Zone. 

And a "rotor" for the TV antenna. The antenna sat atop a tower that rose above roof level on the south side of the house. Reception from the Twin Cities TV stations was iffy at best and turning that knob to rotate the antenna seemed magical. But it rarely made much difference.

Another time mom came home and found she had “electric drapes”. She could now open and close the drapes on the east-side picture windows with the flip of a switch. That also didn’t take off like gangbusters, but it was pretty neat.  

On the rare (one) occasion that we took a winter vacation, dad would rig up a red light-bulb in the front window that would come on if the house temp fell below 50. Arnie Gunness could just look out his window to check on our house. Mother would ask if he could find a different color bulb.

Dad’s service truck was custom, fit with toolboxes and ladder racks and was a model of efficiency, although he didn't have time to be neat, so one of my monthly jobs was to cleanup and help restock this truck. Later he had the luxury of both an electrical and a plumbing truck - made life much easier. He once bought a yellow Ford truck. Uncle Dave said it looked like a lemon - which it turned out to be. Dave said he was expecting something more in a "baby diarrhea" color. From then on, every new truck was "candy-ass" red. (Car dealers should adopt these color names.) This progressive spirit did not extend to automobiles. In fact, we didn’t have a car until 1960, and that was Uncle Dave’s cast off '57 Buick. We went everywhere in the Ford pickup.

He also used his siblings as guinea pigs, once installing a new-fangled "exhaust" toilet in his brother's home. It would take in outside air and expel it and the collected fumes along with the effluvium. I guess lifelong experience had informed him of the location of greatest need for this invention. I'm not sure why this is not now a national building code requirement.