The Garage Fridge: A Small Town Star

You can’t get Big Red in Buffalo. The soda. It is nowhere to be found. Perhaps in a rest stop or gas station somewhere closer to the Pennsylvania border one is rolling around, but here in the city and suburbs, not one bottle.

It’s one of the few Midwest Sins Buffalo commits. I should tell you, now that we’re nearly two sections in, I consider Buffalo to be part of the Midwest. Similar climate, similar culture, and similar history. Those things which are popular in the Heartland are often popular in Buffalo. Big Red is not one of them. I mean, come on; it’s as Keurig Dr. Pepper brand. It’s not like they don’t have the distribution!

Anyway. That’s not important.

Well, it is.

But we have to get moving if this post is going to wrap up in 1,000 words. For reference, we are currently at 148.

While my adopted home of Buffalo may fail me as only a Buffalonian can be failed (see: The Buffalo Bills), for my entire 35 years on this earth, I’ve known of one place and one place only where my thirsting soul can be satisfied with the sweet cream soda notes of Big Red.

The garage fridge.

The Garage Fridge

Every small town kid knows the garage fridge. Even if you didn’t have one growing up (we didn’t), you knew someone who did and you loved them, even if only for this reason.

For me, it was the garage fridge at my grandfather’s house.

His garage fridge now is fine, it is suitable. In fact, the garage fridge has been such an important part of our family’s experience, 15 years ago, he introduced a garage freezer, full of Edy’s and Blue Bell Ice Cream and Drumsticks. However, following its unfortunate and untimely death, the garage freezer was moved and converted to a garage humidor for boxes and boxes of cigars. What a disappointment to hope for some Rocky Road only to be met with Cohibas and Hoyos de Monterrey.

But the garage fridge! This garage fridge, this white, boring, functional fridge, is not the greatest to grace the home of the Tidrow patriarch.

No, no.

That title belongs to THE KING.

The Greatest Garage Fridge of All-Time

The 1947 (or 1942 I cannot remember) teal, ICE COLD, gotta-scrape-ice-off-the-sides refrigerator.

Here’s a picture of a similar model.,

This refrigerator sat across the long black-top drive from the house in the unattached garage. The four walls and roof sat on the asphalt and smelled like canned dogfood, bird seed, rain, and oil-soaked rags. But when we snapped that silver handle free of its lock and dragged that thousand-pound door open, we were soaked in the sweet smell of sharp, damp chemicals and 50-year-old water and ice. Glory.

The teal garage fridge was always full of Big Red, Vernor’s, Squirt, Slice, and the staples—Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew. It was merchandised to perfection—military-precise rows, all faces forward, nothing stacked or crammed. In the door, half-empties we knew not to touch, or one-offs—sodas without families.

I could sit and look at that refrigerator for hours; it was gorgeous. The color. The shape. The style. What a disappointment to walk seventy feet into the house and see some 1980s beige and brown box, harsh with its pointed edged corners, and shoved into the wall in a kitchen that smelled like vinegar and cheese.

Others Have Tried and Failed

It was several years before I saw another garage fridge. I was in my early teens and was spending the night with a friend when his mom told me I could grab whatever I wanted to drink out of the garage. They had a big house, three car garage, and an indoor fridge big enough to hide a body. Why, then, I wondered, did they need a fridge in the garage? Their fridge was new and white. Yawn. It had a freezer on top, where they kept vanilla ice cream and cheap popsicles. Yawn. And beside the fridge were cases of Pepsi and Diet Pepsi stacked taller than my eyes. Again, yawn.

Where’s the romance in that?

You’re going to go through all the hassle of buying a fridge and putting it in the garage only to fill it with the most boring sodas possible? Nothing with a color to it? Nothing with a name that is vaguely racist or sexual? Nothing with a flavor profile whose first sip steals your breath for a second and spins your eyes around like cherries in a slot machine?

You have a garage fridge and it’s boring?!

Sacrilege.

I’d call you vanilla, but that’s still too much flavor for your bland, white ass.

Why the garage fridge?

So, what is it about the garage fridge?

What calls us to its humming siren song? How can something so frigid spark such warmth in our cockles?

Today, garage fridges have grown from an oddity to a staple. It’s not so much about preserving space, as it was in days gone by, or even protecting the beers from the hands of the baby (or baby’s hands from the beer). Now it’s about something more. It’s something we fall homesick for.

E Garagius Unum

And the garage refrigerator belongs to no one class, creed, or cola.

It is now the desire of every man, woman, and school child—collars both blue and white, necks red, white, brown, and black—to keep the coolest of pops or cokes a step or two outside the gentle embrace of the domicile.

Perhaps that’s it—our hunter-gatherer instinct is surging within us, drawing us out of the cave in search of our next thirst-quenching catch. Our next caramel-colored kill.

Perhaps it’s our desire to have our own little convenience store, shelves of our own to stock and straighten. Something to fuss with and obsess over; something we can complain about that isn’t the plumbing or the mortgage or our boss.

Maybe it’s simpler. I think so.

Maybe the garage fridge is the treasure chest we never found as kids, filled to its hinges with cans, candy, and cones, overflowing all for us. A temperature-perfect invitation to relax, prop up our feet, and sink into the comfort of knowing there are enough cold drinks and snacks, a few arms’ lengths away, to satisfy whatever thirst befalls us no matter how long the game goes or how far behind we fall on our honey-do list.

Cheers to the garage fridge.

-AT

PS. Hey, real quick: I’d LOVE to send this kind of fun, small town memory straight to your email. Want to sign up? Just go to the homepage and fill out the box. Thanks!

Adam Tidrow is a serial entrepreneur, expert in American business and economic history, and scholar whose work focuses primarily on local economic development in the American Rust Belt