The infamous Al Capone knew one hundred years ago what Dustin Soyring, a refrigerator mechanic from Minnesota, knows today:
People want what they cannot have—and if you take it away they want it even more.
So it was during the prohibition era in the 1920s when gambling and alcohol were banned, and Al Capone capitalized on the surging demand for outlawed goods and services.
Likewise, Mr. Soyring capitalized on a phone call in 2015.
A friend told the 34-year-old Navy veteran turned diesel mechanic that an old tiger oak and cast iron slot machine apparently survived the police raids on one of Capone’s underground gambling establishments in Chicago. The machine’s make dates from the 1896. It had been hidden away by someone who figured it was too beautiful to be smashed.
So, Mr. Soyring drove from his home in Hibbing to the Windy City hauling a trailer and paid $10,000 for the 300-pound, antique slot machine. It’s since become part of his extensive collection of antiquated (but hardly outmoded) trinkets from olden days America.
“I’ve got [the slot machine] in my home bar/museum, it’s in the corner in the basement,” Mr. Soyring told The Epoch Times. “This thing was probably stuffed away in the late 1920s.
“It needed minimal restoration. I got it working, and I don’t know if anyone famous owned it, I don’t know if it’s linked to Al Capone or not.”
The machine operates without electricity, using the weight of a coin alone to set the internal mechanism in motion.
Besides slot machines and an assortment of other vintage gizmos, his collection includes dozens of odd can-opening devices from as early as 1888. And, Mr. Soyring says, if you think today’s can openers work better than older ones, think again. Tools were built to last back then; they had to work or people wouldn’t buy them. Thus, another old adage he swears by holds true:
They don’t make ’em like they used to.
Today, there’s mainly just your standard butterfly opener that winds around the top of the can. But there were, “I would say, at least 100 different variations of openers that do the same thing in one form or another” from earlier, he said.
Some are round and others straight, often very simple with wrought iron blades that you have to sharpen yourself.
“They pretty much figured it out by the 1920s,” Mr. Soyring said, speaking of when designs began to coalesce.
The thing about antique tools is they were “built for the purpose, back then,” he said. “I know, definitely, if it was built 100 years ago, it was going to last” because “they had to open cans that were twice as thick as they have now.” Plastic wasn’t prevalent in the 1800s while tin cans had emerged in full force by the 1870s to compete with the preeminent Mason jar.
Besides can openers, Mr. Soyring has some curiosities beyond modern man’s expectations, such as the antique headlamps miners used to wear that emit brightly-ignited acetylene gas: a small metal container with a drip system regulates water to combine with calcium carbide, causing a gas-producing reaction. A simple flint mechanism sparks the pilot light. The lamps were once used in coal mines in the early 1900s—they’re still used in raccoon hunting today.
Equally remarkable are his assortment of aerolux lightbulbs that stopped being made half a century ago.
But the biggest secret in his collection, Mr. Soyring says, lies hidden in old fridges. As in can openers, planned obsolescence is omnipresent in modern varieties, whose manufacturers want you to throw out the old and buy new.
“It’s actually a real touchy subject,” he said, speaking of how new refrigerators cannot compare to those of the 1930s. “They worked better” and were “built to last.” Some were even made with porcelain bodies.
He said, “When the R-12 came out—that’s the ozone-depleting refrigerant that everyone’s pretty well aware of, an excellent refrigerant—and when they had developed the hermetic compressor, which is what we still use today, they overbuilt them by accident.” In other words, they will work indefinitely. His R-12s from 1928 are still running strong.
That’s the big secret appliance giants don’t want you to know. Some old fridges simply won’t die.
He’s found a profitable niche doing full restorations of antique fridges that many across the nation had hoped to salvage. A mere handful of mechanics nationwide offer top-to-bottom service on them as Mr. Soyring does—everything from rewiring to custom paint jobs.
A “factory white” restored can cost $1,500 while a full chrome replating job—the full Cadillac refrigerator treatment—can run $3,000.
Mr. Soyring will drive cross-state to pick up antique fridges and other collectibles while work orders come flooding in, booking him easily two years ahead. And as his marvelous antiques started attracting millions of viewers on social media, he claims, he’s singlehandedly hyperinflated demand for rare gadgets, now fetching hundreds on eBay.
If true, it would only prove the old adage about the scarcity effect still holds.
