Noir Office Fan

The noir detective’s office has been progressing, albeit slowly and in the background. The latest addition is a little gift provided by two close friends, a Barcol Eight two bladed Bakelite fan.

The Barber-Colman (Barcol) company once was the largest manufacturer in Rockford, IL with a nearly 65 acre facility that made everything from temperature controls to garage door openers. The factory now sits empty, it’s once busy corridors gathering dust. Like in so much of American manufacturing, the well-paying jobs that once fed and clothed a generation have been shipped to third world countries where it can be performed at slave labor rates of pay under sweat shop conditions.

I did an Internet search for Barcol fan ads and came up disappointingly empty. I did turn up a 50’s era garage door opener ad that ran in the Rotarian magazine. Sometimes its striking how much these ads remind me of the suburb where I grew up, right down to the coffered garage doors. This is an image of suburban sprawl before the term carried the negative connotations it’s associated with now. You’re seeing an image of the blue-collar American dream Ozzie and Harriet-style; a three bedroom bungalow on a tree-lined street with a two car garage and a swing set in the backyard.

Dreams die hard, though. That same neighborhood in 2013 is a run-down second-ring suburb. The streets are in disrepair, the sidewalks are cracking and heaving more every winter, and Dutch elm disease or emerald ash borers have killed just about every shade tree. The people who occupy these 50’s bungalows can barely hold on, their dream is to make the mortgage and maybe put away enough to send their kids to college. But I digress.

I stumbled across a page from a 1939 catalog that features the Barcol Eight. It's probably appropriate that the fan which will be stirring the air in my little detective's office is the cheapest model available. Now we'd never consider something like a power switch or speed control as options, but Barcol produced a fan that had neither. You got one speed and if you wanted to turn the fan off you unplugged it and liked it. The trade of was you paid a  whopping $2.35 for your fan. As for my part, I’ll have to perform some minor repairs before plugging my Eight in. It has an iffy cord and the one time I dared plug it into an outlet it made a grinding noise that suggested it might burst into flames. I’m guessing I’ll either be cleaning the motor or replacing it.