Fake Floors and Suspect Stoves: Enterprising Fraudsters of Ypsilanti's Past

Here's a li'l story Dusty D wrote about some shady entrepreneurs of Ypsi's past. Hope you like it!

Most counterfeiters combine practicality with talent by creating wallet-sized artworks both lucrative and portable. This sensible approach did not occur to two salesmen who hoodwinked a Ypsilanti housewife with a cumbersome fraud.

“Beware of the linoleum salesmen,” intoned the July 18, 1922 Daily Ypsilantian - Press, “who have a “few pieces” of linoleum extraordinary . . . that they’re perfectly willing to part with . . . The warning is sounded through Chief of Police Connors by Mrs. Henry Miner of North River Street, and by heeding the warning you are getting for nothing what it cost Mrs. Miner $8.50 to find out.”

A few days earlier Mrs. Miner had answered the door to find two well-dressed gentlemen. “They told her they were linoleum experts,” said the Press, “who had just finished laying a “big job” and they had a few pieces left over they would sacrifice. Two of these pieces they took into Mrs. Miner’s home and rolled out carefully on the floor. Perfect looks and a near fit. They quoted $12 on the outfit. Mrs. Miner protested that $12 was too much, and following considerable parleying a compromise at $8.50 was reached. Mrs. Miner paid and the men departed.”

Although linoleum is generally not complicated, “Mrs. Miner learned a lot of things about her linoleum that the salesmen had failed to tell. Principal of these reasons was that the linoleum was just a conglomeration of pretty colors stenciled on tar roofing paper and is worth about $1 to look at and nothing as a floor covering.” One wonders if Mrs. Miner, despite the deception, kept the fake linoleum in her home, to get her $1 worth.

Another fake covering peddled from door to door the following year was a “smooth top” to install over an open-burner gas range. Inventor J. G. Scott patented a smooth-top gas range in 1919. Its elegant flat metal cooking surface resembled a modern electric smooth-top range. The Ypsilanti street peddler was selling not this range but only a metal plate to fit over the standard open-burner gas range (electric stoves were almost unknown in 1923). The plate created the snazzy new smooth-top look. Unfortunately, it also wasted gas and filled homes with deadly carbon monoxide.

The peddler so alarmed the Ypsilanti City Gas Department that they bought a large display ad in the December 14 Daily Ypsilantian - Press. Titled “A Warning To Gas Users,” it says, “Recently there has been a man going about the city selling a smooth top to use on gas ranges, claiming a great reduction in the amount of gas used with this appliance, as against the ordinary open top range. As a matter of fact, this is not the case.” The ad quotes an excerpt from the trade publication The Gas Age-Record. To add even more authority to this excerpt, the city gas department says that its topic, smooth-tops, was “part of a discussion on unsafe Gas Appliances as discussed at the Baltimore Gas Convention.”

The excerpt says “A physician’s wife had suffered from headaches for a year and a test showed that the kitchen range was giving out 5.6 cu. Ft. of carbon monoxide per hour from four burners lighted. It was a range in which the grid top had been displaced by a solid top, which resulted in improper manner of supply of secondary air and inadequate provision for the escape of burned gases. When the solid top was removed and the grids put back there was proper aeration and no carbon monoxide was formed.” The ad explains that properly designed smooth-top stoves are safe but that the addition of a top to an open-burner stove was deadly. The ad ends with the phrase “A Word to the Wise is Sufficient,” having just spent 358 words in its warning.

A Daily Ypsilantian-Press story about the peddler concludes, “As one housewife put it: ‘If the women would only buy everything from reliable merchants instead of fooling themselves with the idea that they were saving something by patronizing the outside smooth-tongued artist, they would be better off and also save money.” Perhaps she took this lesson from the previous year’s summer, when Mrs. Miner had the linoleum pulled out from under her.