Front Porch: Farewell, dear freezer. You served the family well

I have known personally and now said farewell to an item that surely deserves special recognition in the category of “they don’t make ’em like that any more.”

It was a deep and huge Whirlpool chest freezer that, when it finally gasped its last earlier this winter, it simply couldn’t be repaired. My sister-in-law Barbara, its last owner, was informed that no way, no where, no how was there a compressor that would fit, and that compressors that did fit had stopped being made a long time ago.

It had been purchased originally from Sears Roebuck in Anchorage somewhere around 1950 by Carl and Golden Pettit, Barbara’s parents, and it had run for just about 75 years, never needing any kind of repair – not even once.

The freezer came to them back in the days when Alaska was still a territory, when the family only went to the commissary once a month, when fresh food was really expensive and not readily available (unless grown in their own garden) and when most every purchased grocery item was canned.

I have heard stories of whole chickens that would come schlurping out of the can when the can was opened and turned upside down. I have always tried to erase that image from my mind.

Just about everybody hunted.

The Pettits, whose son Bruce grew up to become my husband, rented a freezer for a while, but when Carl shot a bear, “we really needed a bigger freezer to put the meat in,” Barbara told me. “The Sears freezer went into the garage and got filled all the way up with bear meat.”

The family moved into a rented house in Eagle River, 15 miles north of Anchorage (though it’s now considered a suburb), near Fort Richardson, and the freezer went into a shed. Carl started building a home for the family on nearby land. They moved into a small cabin on the land and hauled in another shed to house the freezer and some other equipment. Although just a little kid, Bruce helped pour footings to support the shed.

When the house was built, the freezer stayed in the shed, some distance from the new house, where it kept frozen additional game (moose, quite often, which provided protein for the winter), pies and ice cream. There were boards laid on the ground outside – always slippery, I’m told – a walkway that led from the house to the shed. It was muddy or icy or hidden under the snow. “We always slipped and fell, no matter the weather,” Barbara remembered.

Barbara or Bruce were assigned the task of going out to the freezer to retrieve whatever it was that their mother wanted to cook for dinner. And then after dinner, one of them would go retrieve a pie or the always-longed-for ice cream.

There always had to be ice cream at night.

But the problem was that the door to the shed was on the far side, facing the woods … where there were bears and moose (moose can be quite cranky) and other things that went bump in the night. In the winter months, there were many hours of darkness, and one of the siblings would be required to traverse the territory between the kitchen and the unseen-from-there door on the far side of the shed, in the darkness, where surely there awaited monsters.

And it was cold. But the lure of ice cream was great. Barbara threatened and cajoled and promised her brother all sorts of things if he would take her turn getting the ice cream – usually something like doing the evening dishes for a week.

Then the kids grew up. Barbara spent her early married years living nearby, and it fell to her two children to brave the scary journey to fetch the ice cream when having dinner with the grandparents. Later she and her family, and Bruce as well, moved away to make their lives elsewhere.

When Carl retired, he and Golden moved to Spokane, where Bruce and I lived with our oldest son and a second child on the way. They bought a home on ¾ of an acre in Spokane Valley, with a big red barn, where the freezer made its new home.

No more hunting, but “you never really get past that mentality of having meat for the winter,” Barbara said. They had a neighbor who was a butcher, so they would buy a quarter or a half a beef, Al would cut and wrap it, and the freezer was filled again – along with some blanched vegetables (peas, especially) from the garden Carl grew – much of which was shared with us. And of course, there was ice cream, though the walk from the back door of the house to the barn was not nearly as adventurous as it was back in the Eagle River days.

After my mother- and father-in-law died, the house passed to Barbara, and our nephew lived there for a while. Barbara eventually sold it, bringing the freezer to the basement of the home she and her husband purchased on a 1-acre cherry orchard on Stemilt Hill in Wenatchee.

It did its usual quality job of keeping things fresh frozen in that location, as it did when it was relocated to the garage in the next home they moved into in East Wenatchee, where in recent years it held a lot of frozen fruit (peaches, apples, blueberries, apricots) used for smoothies. And some pies and Costco cakes. And, of course, ice cream.

It was Barbara’s granddaughter Trinity’s job to go fetch the ice cream.

The old Whirlpool worked beautifully, despite the bumps and bruises and the many moves, until three-quarters of a century later, it finally didn’t.

Many families have heirlooms or items that have generations of family stories connected to them. And sometimes they come in the form of a big boxy freezer.

“I admit,” Barbara told me, “I felt nostalgic when it was carried out. I even waved goodbye.”

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net