March 9, 2009 issue
‘Amish’ heater the Amish couldn’t use
By Laura Johnston Religion News ServiceCANTON, Ohio — It sounds absurd. An Amish miracle heater? Really?
“It’s a joke because the Amish couldn’t use the heater itself,” said Donald Kraybill, an Amish expert at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. “It’s kind of like Quakers selling Quaker guns. It’s sort of an oxymoron.”
Even so, that oxymoron has sold thousands of Roll-n-Glow electric fireplaces for Canton company Heat Surge LLC.
They’re two feet tall, 1,500 watts, wrapped in a mantel of oak ($547) or cherry ($587). And in hokey commercials and full-page newspaper ads, they’re touted by women in bonnets, men in straw hats, a couple driving a buggy — and, in some publications, two nearly naked women in bed.
“Amish man’s new miracle idea helps home heat bills hit rock bottom,” screams one ad, fashioned to look like a newspaper article.
“You’ll instantly feel bone- soothing heat in any room. You will never have to be cold again.”
It’s an enticing prospect in this winter, and this economy. But a $20 hardware-store space heater provides the same amount of heat.
It just doesn’t have the Amish name, or a flickering fake fire.
The Amish brand represents “handmade quality, old-fashioned values, rural charm,” said Erik Wesner, who writes a blog called Amish America.
He calls the heater ads “pretty hilarious… . It’s mind-boggling because they’re making associations with things not typically Amish.”
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