By Gil Kiekenapp

Grampa Kiekenapp's big house on Third Avenue in Faribault never failed to awe and overwhelm this mid-1940s ten-year-old. Besides a view of the outside world through various color sections of a stained glass window, wooden columns between the parlor and living room, and sliding double polished wood doors separating a formal dining room from the living room. Way back behind the kitchen was a pantry with the whole north wall devoted to multiple oaken doors to a huge “ice-box”!  Not a refrigerator, mind you, but an “ice-box.” One solidly insulated door led to a “very cold” section, one to a cold section and one to cool (no doubt for table-spreadable butter).

Once a week (maybe twice in hot summer) the ice-man would come and deliver a huge block of ice through an outdoor ice-box access on the back porch. One would not have to be home to accept delivery and “service persons” wouldn't track up the house.

Eventually I was to learn that the ice was harvested from Canon Lake during the winter and stored straw-packed, underground in a cool building near Canon River.

The “ice-box” and its feeder system were truly a marvel of the times. The “ice-box” did the job for the household of the era and the system worked to the advantage of the server and the comfort and delight of the consumer. 

At the time I just thought that wall of “ice-box” was the most scientifically advanced bit of invented marvel that mere mortals could ever have come up with. 

Thirty-five years ago we had a big house of affiliate groups and individual dues-paying members that made up a Minnesota Senior Federation that never failed to awe and overwhelm the world of that day. Visionaries and activists saw a forest of inequities surrounding society's big house on Aging Avenue and in looking for help to find  a way out of the dark woods they build an “eyes-box;” the most scientifically advanced bit of invented marvel that mere mortals could ever have come up with at the time. 

We have found ourselves still using the 35-year-old “eyes-box” and often some try to discern reality looking through rose-colored-glass sections of stained windows, but the pillered parlor and sliding salon doors are no longer effective in our new fast-paced  informal wired world. Instead of the ice-man cometh, now the eyes-person does laser by appointment only.

Judging by our crisis in finances, our crisis in membership numbers and our crisis in skills-based leadership development, the old “eyes-box” is not doing the job for our household of today. It seems often a hindrance rather than advantage, and it cannot be said to be comfort and delight to most of us consumers. 

Almost nobody is delivering to the old “ice-box” and the old “eyes-box” any more, so reality dictates that if we intend to avoid ptomaine poisoning from spoiled food from the box, we had better put in our order now for a refrigerator: the upgraded re-vision organization plan coming in October. When we then “ice” reality and “eye” the future all will see and be ...

Way cool!