Model E Obsession
A fellow collector emailed and asked:
"Just out of curiosity, why is the E your favorite? It certainly not the best looking model Electrolux ever made and it was the budget model. We had an AE when I was a child which I thought was the cats meow until be got a turquoise G. Then I really fell in love."
--------------------------
Here is my reply:
I guess I'd have to answer that question the same way I answer the question when people ask "Why do you like old vacuum cleaners?"
"Just because!"
Actually, I am sure it's due in large part to the fact that when I was very young, our next-door neighbor in Hampton, Virginia had one. You will recall that my mom had an AE, and the people next door, whose two sons were my playmates, had an E. I was endlessly fascinated with the differences between it and my mom's AE -- the way the front cover came off instead of hinging open, the blue hose coupler, the friction-fit floor tool, the lack of suction relief vent on the hose handle.......!
Yes, even at 3 and 4 years of age I was observant enough to notice all that! I even remember exactly how Mrs. Stroud put it away when she was finished using it - she removed the hose, wands and brush, neatly coiled the cord around the halo, rested the machine on the floor in the hall closet, tucked the wands and brush in front of it and draped the hose around it.
My mom, when finished, would basically just toss the whole machine, still all connected, into our hall closet, then throw the cord in after it! I would go in there and rearrange it like Mrs. Stroud's, which would annoy Mama to no end the next time she would go get it to do her cleaning. She would fuss about having to put it all together again!
I got a good spanking one time when I tried to remove the hinge from my Mom's AE to make the cover come off like Mrs. Stroud's E. I had figured out what was holding the AE cover in place - the small silver bar at the bottom, and was trying to bang it with a hammer. (Okay, give me a break - I was 3!) Mama heard me whapping with the hammer, came running to see what was going on, saw me pounding on her sweeper, and began pounding on me! How does a 3-year-old kid explain to his very annoyed mother that he was just trying to modify her Electrolux?!
(Another time, I decided I was going to "fix" her sweeper. I literally took out every screw until the thing was just a pile of parts. This of course elicited another dose of corporal punishment, and yet another one when Daddy couldn't get it all back together correctly and they had to call the Electrolux man to come out to put it right again!!)
One lady, a fellow church organist of my mom's, had one that she kept in her front hall closet. Every time I would go over there I would have to go peek in the closet to look at it. I remember her son, who was a teenager at the time, teasing me about it. He stood in front of the closet door and would not let me in to see it. So I did what any kid would do - I kicked him in the shins!
Then, when I was around 11 years old we moved to another part of Virginia and there was a large general market and seafood store down on the waterfront where we kids would go buy candy and gum. One day I was there wandering around and I saw in the back of the store one of those huge chest-type deep-freezes. Draped over top of it was a long, long vacuum cleaner hose - a gray cloth hose with blue chevron tracing!
I immediately recognized it as an Electrolux hose but I had never seen one that long! It literally was so long that it nearly touched the floor on both ends, even draped longwise across that huge deep freeze. So I knew there had to be an Electrolux around there somewhere and I began looking. I looked high and low and could not find it.
Then I had to "go pee" so I asked the man who ran the store, Mr. Callis, to use the bathroom. It was way, way back in a rear corner of the store. I went in there, turned on the light, closed the door, and there, standing on end, was a Model E! Needless to say, thereafter I seemed to have many urgent needs to go to the bathroom when I was at Callis' Market!
(It was not until many years later, when I was an adult, that I discovered Electrolux use to sell a "commercial length" hose -- there was an extra-long XXX style, and also an LX/E style. Apparently, Mr. Callis had gotten the extra long hose with the E for his market.)
Another Model E that I have a lot of memories of was one that had a cord winder. The electric lead from the cord winder had been hard-wired to the switch inside the motor housing, so the cord winder was not removable. The hose on that E was an older hose, from an XXX. I always wondered about that until one day I was playing with the lady's kids in their grandparents' old barn and I saw, over in a corner, a Model XXX - with an E hose!!
Then there was another lady who had an E that had been wired up for a power nozzle -- early Model G vintage, and with a new turquoise G hose. The power nozzle connector was down on the bottom of the machine, in a little metal box that had been attached underneath, just behind the front wheel. I was supposed to go there to mow her grass, but somehow I always ended up doing her vacuuming as well!
And I remember seeing several quite a few other Es when I was a kid. While I was happy to use any vacuum cleaner, regardless of how humble, I don't know, there was just something about the Model E that really sent my heart racing!
The only other machine that really got me as enthralled as the Model E Electrolux was the 513-515 Kirby. But that's another story!