I didn't really pay much attention to our door bell until my mom said to my dad, "Oh, this is one of those medallion homes... remember those?"
I was curious. So I did a little research on why my new house had this little plaque on it's door bell and why that was a sign of "living better".
Here are general facts I though were interesting:
(also, my dad loves this kind of stuff. Dad, this is for you:)
Our house was built in 1968. The year Martin Luther King , Jr and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and we were at war in Vietnam, the year the Tet Offensive was launched by the Viet Cong on January 30. It was the year before we put a man on the moon, Lyndon B. Johnson was president, Nixon and Agnew were campaigning to be voted in the following year and bell bottoms were all the rage. The summer olympics were held that year in Mexico and Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the Black Power salute while on the podium receiving their medals. Hot wheels made their first appearance that year, as well as it being the year that Roy Jacuzzi invented, you guessed it, the jacuzzi. The movie Oliver! won best picture, a Super Bowl add cost $54,000, and "I Heard It Through the Grape Vine" and "Hey Jude" were a few songs that made number one on the billboard charts that year.
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My mom was a junior in high school living in Long Beach and my dad was a junior in high school living in Seattle. Good times!
So back to that door bell, the whole reason I started looking up these facts in the first place...
Here's what I found online:
To keep demand high, the electrical industry launched the Live Better Electrically, or LBE, campaign in March 1956. It was supported nationwide by 300 electric utilities and 180 electrical manufacturers.
The campaign got then-actor Ronald Reagan, the popular host of "General Electric Theater," to take his television audience on a series of tours of his and wife Nancy's all-electric Pacific Palisades home.
An in-house GE sales pitch declared that "by Thanksgiving, there should not be a man, woman or child in America who doesn't know that you can 'Live Better Electrically' with General Electric appliances and television."
In October 1957, LBE launched the "Medallion Homes" campaign, which sought to sell 20,000 all-electric homes nationwide by 1958, 100,000 by 1960 and 970,000 by 1970.
To earn a gold medallion--a decal affixed to a home's entryway and considered the apex of modern, all-electric living--a home had to have an electric clothes washer and dryer, waste disposal, refrigerator and all-electric heating.
The Medallion Homes campaign was a huge success. By some estimates, the nationwide goal of about 1 million all-electric homes was achieved, according to the Edison Electric Institute, although data on the actual number built is unavailable.
I love thinking about what it was like when the homes in our housing track were being built. To think that people have come and gone but the house still stands and that we get to be part of IT's history for awhile is pretty special.
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This sunday marks that we have been living here for three months.
I LOVE living here and I am so thankful that we made the move!
