Still Cooking

The cosmos had Carl Sagan, the ocean had Jacques Cousteau and the universe of old stoves, refrigerators, toasters, mixers, slicers and dicers has Jack Santoro.

Santoro, 51, is cooking with gas these days.

His newsletter, “The Old Road Home,” now has nearly 5,000 subscribers. His Web site (www.antiquestoves.com) logged 19,000 hits last week.

Every day, a supplicant calls for advice on how to fix a balky thermostat or replace some stained porcelain or find a knob for the 1934 Magic Chef that was out in Uncle Herb’s barn. An ex-rock musician, Santoro has found a new life as the vicar of vintage, the spiritual leader of old-appliance aficionados throughout the U.S.

“He’s the Wizard of Oz,” said Mike Arnold, an appliance restoration specialist in Troy, N.Y. “He’s made it possible for people to find things and to have things repaired. Jack has made things boom.”

At his 1920s Spanish bungalow in midtown Ventura, Santoro fields old-appliance calls from no less than the Smithsonian Institution, which was desperately seeking a 1934 or 1935 General Electric T-7 Monitor Top refrigerator for a display.

After putting the word out to his network of collectors, dealers and repair people, Santoro pointed the Smithsonian’s researchers to one in West Virginia.

“We have lots of folks around here who recommended the Old Appliance Club,” said Carlene Stephens, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “That led us to Jack, who was almost the first stop in our search.”

A quick call to Santoro lasts awhile. A gregarious man whose speech is thick with the echoes of his native New Jersey, he kicks into conversational overdrive when he talks about the chrome-laden ranges and refrigerators of yesteryear.

“They had human beings putting them together,” he said. “If you take apart this old stuff, you always find these really cuckoo things--people signing their names on the inside of stoves, or little notes with the date, or fingerprints--right there in the porcelain!”

To the untrained eye, that battered mixer or rusted-out stove might be a piece of junk. But to Santoro, it’s a great example of simple, sturdy workmanship. Even more, it’s a saga.

He can tell you about Cowboy Joe Long, the legendary Maytag salesman who plodded through west Texas with his washing machine slung over a burro.

And about the French abbott who advanced refrigeration by coming up with a contraption to chill the wine made by his fellow monks.

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And about the poor sap who accepted a flat $10,000 instead of royalties for his modest invention--the shelves inside refrigerator doors.

“Can you imagine how much money that guy would have gotten if he had just passed on the 10 grand?” Santoro asked with awe.

Instead, a visionary named Powel Crosley, the first man to build radios into his refrigerators, cornered refrigerator-door shelves the way Bill Gates cornered computer Windows, and presented the world with the Crosley Shelvador.

“Now, Powel Crosley,” Santoro went on. “Now, there was a wild guy . . .”

Santoro wasn’t born to such lore.

A precocious guitarist, he played his first gig at the age of 9: a show at a New Jersey country music bar called Harold’s Truck Stop.

As a teenager, he played with his group, the Fabulons, in garages, rented halls, strip clubs and rock shows.

But one day in 1976, the music stopped. Santoro’s career had taken off. He had performed and done studio work in L.A. behind the likes of the Beach Boys. But his band splintered. “I’d had it,” he said. “I hung up my guns.”

Santoro ran a moving and storage company--he still has Alan Ladd’s couch--before discovering his true calling.

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“One afternoon, I just started fooling around with this old stove that had been put in storage,” he said. “And I fixed it--the thing was working great!”

Santoro started restoring vintage appliances and selling them from a showroom in Reseda. He and his wife, Erica, a graphic artist, later moved to Ventura, where he wrote manuals on stove restoration and marketed them by mail-order from home.

After an injury knocked him out of the restoration business, he founded the Old Appliance Club. For $24.95 annually, members get to pick his brain on technical issues. Through “The Old Road Home,” the club’s zany periodical, they also gain access to people across the country who can fix the octagonal clock on a Magic Chef 6300 or are willing to part with the aeration pan for a 1954 Kenmore gas range.

When it comes to old appliances, club members are true believers.

“One woman took a nine-hour drive here hauling her grandfather’s 1,000-pound Frigidaire behind her Isuzu,” said Mike Arnold, the restoration specialist in upstate New York. “It was starting to make a noise.”

Santoro is equally devoted to the appliances in his own kitchen.

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His 1936 refrigerator has never needed a repair.

His stove--a 1952 O’Keefe and Merritt Aristocrat with six burners, three broilers, a double oven and a warming closet--had been partly melted in a Montecito fire. Santoro bought it at a garage sale. “It took a dozen stoves and 11 months to restore it,” he said. “But now we can roast three chickens at a time on rotating spits. The ones on the left and right go clockwise, and the one in the center goes counter-clockwise. It’s like watching a little show.”