In the early 1950s, my grandmother had a gas range that she had owned for many years and that she felt quite comfortable using. One day, when my father was 5 or 6 years old and was watching her cook dinner, she opened the oven door, made a small exclamation that the gas was out, and then tried to relight the oven with a match. He watched as it exploded with enough force to knock his mother off her feet and singe her hair and eyebrows. It was a pretty traumatic experience for a child, and he remembers it quite vividly. I'm not sure if gas companies were even required to add odorant mercaptans to natural gas at this point, but she obviously didn't realize how much gas was present when she lit that match.

Thirty years later, my brother moved into a new apartment with an older gas stove. He lit the oven and then walked away while the oven preheated. When he came back a few minutes later and opened the oven to see if the oven was hot, he was literally blown across the room by the force of the explosion. Luckily he suffered no more than bumps, bruises, and burned hair, but it sure got his attention. His eyebrows took months to grow back.

It might be easy to think that these were both situations in which the user was partly to blame, but the reality is that not every person who may use your beautiful vintage stove in the future will be an expert. Can you count on everyone to stop and think the situation through when they open the door and are surprised to find that the oven is cold? Maybe, like my brother, they won't have a chance to think at all. There are plenty of ignition sources in a kitchen, including two standing pilots just on that lovely Chambers stove.

A working safety system would have prevented both of the near misses in my family. Cooking dinner should not be an extreme sport.

-Jenn