Overstock from Pioneer Village.
NuTone, Inc. was a prominent American manufacturer founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, that specialized in built-in home convenience products. During the mid-twentieth century, the company became famous for integrated household systems that combined door chimes, intercoms, AM-FM radios, and record players into central wall units. These music systems were engineered to distribute sound throughout various rooms in a modern residential home using remote speakers.
Homeowners and builders installed these music centers directly into living room walls, dens, or specialized hallway cabinets during construction or major renovations. Families used them to play vinyl records and broadcast radio programs to different parts of the house simultaneously while entertaining guests or doing daily chores. As standalone stereo equipment advanced and centralized wall-mounted home audio systems fell out of fashion in later decades, these built-in units largely disappeared from modern interior design.
Harold Warp (December 21, 1903 – April 8, 1994) was an American businessman who invented Flex-O-Glass. He also founded Pioneer Village in Minden, Nebraska. [1] [2] [3]
Harold Warp was born in a sod house on a farm near Minden, Nebraska. He was the youngest of twelve children born to an immigrant family from Norway. When he was three years old, his father died; his mother died when he was eleven. In 1924, he and two of his brothers moved to Chicago with a patent for a plastic window material he had developed. Their business became successful and in time its product line grew to include many other plastic products. Harold Warp was the recipient of numerous awards including the Horatio Alger Award in 1979 and the Distinguished Nebraskalander Award in 1984.[4][5][6]
He opened Pioneer Village in 1953 in Minden, Nebraska. Most of the objects on display were personally collected by him in his lifetime. In 1983, Warp donated the museum to the nonprofit Harold Warp Pioneer Village Foundation.