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Serial #0115

New Perfection Story Chest

With pounds of old spark plugs and truck valves in the oven, and bolts, mud dauber nests, and tractor parts in the burner cavities, the old cook stove is almost passed over for the last salvage run. Further doubts are raised about the worthiness of the old shell during the physically taxing chore of lugging it from the back of the decrepit shop, over all the intervening junk, and onto the waiting trailer. After a wild ride and scouring in a Panhandle thunderstorm, the brightened old stove reveals itself to be a 1926 New Perfection.

Rusty, perforated parts from the stove’s oven are joined with pink and green trim from a haunted house in Higgins, Texas and gray siding boards from the wagon driveway in the Bucher barn near Lipscomb to make the New Perfection Story Chest. If there are spirits in the old house, they leave us alone during the salvage work. We did find a small, half-full bottle of bay rum hidden behind the basement doorjamb. Newspapers under the linoleum in the bathroom date from 1938. Maybe the house escaped the April 9, 1947 tornado, or maybe it is one of the houses moved in from the country after the storm.

Wire door and drawer pulls are part of the strands of heavy gauge wire that spanned from wall to wall in the granary just of the Bucher wagon drive-through, and helped hold in the bulging weight of bushels of grain.