On New Year's Eve day, I picked up my friend from his house at 7 am to make the nearly 13 hour trip to Missoula, MT. We were driving there to spend the weekend packing up and moving my wife's grandfather back to our hometown where he would be near his family and closer to advanced medical facilities. As luck would have it, I had the 24-hour stomach flu and was trying hard just to keep water down. My friend, who can typically lift the heaviest of objects effortlessly, had cracked a rib two days prior. When we finally arrived after driving through snow, ice, and delays at the auto part store, we were the most pathetic 'help' anyone would want to see. Yet, when my father in-law saw us, he was still so happy he almost cried.
He had arrived several days earlier to start boxing everything up and during that time, he and my grandfather in-law had almost driven each other mad. Best of all, this ongoing getting-on-nerves culminated in a dispute over fruit pies. You know the little individually wrapped ones that are chock-full of preservatives and kind of taste like sugar-glazed cardboard with some jelly filling? Yeah, those ones. We had a good laugh over that, or at least we would have if my stomach still didn't feel like I'd been deep-sea fishing all day and my friend wasn't wincing at his cracked rib every 10 minutes. Sadly, we spent our New Year's Eve in the living room at that old house half-consciously watching a football game instead of reveling in downtown Missoula with the rest of the crowd.
By the next day, I was feeling much better and we continued boxing, labelling, and sorting. Grandpa had collected quite a few vintage things over the years including a pedal-pump organ that was brought to Idaho in a covered wagon, vintage 60's metal lawn chairs and dining table, an original Forest Service-commissioned trail-bike, a '66 Chevy C10 Fleetside pickup, and two antique wood/gas stoves. Growing up, my wife knew about all these treasures and I had merely glimpsed them during our brief visits so when she found out we were moving him, she asked that we make sure and bring as many of these back with us rather than just try and sell them. Often, as we were huffing and puffing our way up the very steep stairs from the basement with some of the heavier items we would ask Grandpa how the heck he got them down there and he'd say with a straight face, "By myself." Guess you just can't find good help these days.
The lawn chairs and the stoves had been outside for a long time under a little covered patio but they had still seen a fair amount of weathering. Of the two stoves, one looked to be in pretty bad shape and was a rather unremarkable model but the other was emblazoned "Monarch Malleable" on the oven door and, though quite rusted in parts, had a wonderful enamel coating that just looked classic. So I decided to bring the Monarch back. Disassembling just the top part would've taken half a day with the amount of rust on the bolts so we opted to lift the entire thing into the U-haul. Talk about heavy. Thankfully, it was one of the last things to load because after that we were done doing anything productive.
Since then, we've had the old stove in the back yard until better weather arrived and I recently started disassembling the thing. It's been a fun project and I've learned a lot about these old stoves. Most helpful was www.monarchrange.com that gave a lot of history of the Malleable Iron Range company and the website's administrator who was able to send me scanned copies of their old catalogs and helped me identify the year and model of our particular stove. I hope to have the stove restored soon and post some of my progress as I go along. Projects like this have always intrigued me and that's why I'm starting this blog, to retain my own thoughts about the various good and bad projects I consider tackling and then share my joy or misery with anyone that cares.
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