My wife and I are in the process of purchasing a home. The kitchen is decked out with steel cabinets, which is really retro but awesome! When we went and toured the home I noticed that the modern electric range had some significant gaps between the cabinets on each side. The realtor explained that the old stove had been removed by previous owners. I never really gave it any thought. I looked up some old kitchen appliance brochures, just to see what late 1940s early 1950s kitchens looked like. I showed my wife and said it would have been sort of neat to have the original stove in the kitchen. Well, good things come to those who wait.
While visiting my in-laws in Milwaukee I acquired one of these vintage stoves by chance. My father-in-law’s friend was also visiting from Portland; he used to live in Milwaukee. We told him about our new house and the vintage kitchen. He told me that the house he wants to sell has an old GE stove in it and we could have it. Sometimes I cannot believe how these opportunities come along. We went over and checked it all over, and the stove is absolutely amazing.
The only mystery I had to solve was the year and model name of this range. I had a category number (C-32) and serial number(7888101) that I found in the oven. One would think that a Google search would muster some answers. This was not an easy task! I found other models of GE ranges but nothing that matched this model. I sort of put this quest on the back burner, but tonight I found my answer! I asked myself, who would know more about GE appliances than GE!? I gave the GE hotline a ring (1-800-626-2005) and asked the customer service representative. I am sure not too many people are calling up this hotline asking about info on ancient appliances. Nonetheless, she was able to tell me that my electric stove was from 1950. She was not able to find out what the name of the model was (Stratoliner, Liberator, Airliner, etc). The search went on!
With very little information available, I decided to go through Newspaperarchive.com and find some answers. I narrowed my years to 1950, and I did a search for “GE Electric Range” in all newspapers. I finally got the results I was looking for. It turns out this model is the GE “Astroliner” electric range. There was no indication of that on the unit itself, but the advertisement I found matches the appearance of our range and the model C-32 I found in the oven door.
I cannot wait to get this oven in our new house once we move in! It will be one step closer to being the original retro kitchen. Maybe a retro refrigerator will be installed one day. How many of my readers remember having or still have one of these old units? What brand do you use?
Austin M. Frederick 
She’s a beauty! What luck! Wishing I had the same. This one looks like the one my sister had in her house on S 13th in Milwaukee. It’s was beautiful and worked like a dream, with the soup pot at the back burner, that drops down inside.
I know! I love the collapsing burner for the pot. I cannot wait to coot some pasta up in that. Although, but wife is concerned that the oven is too small. One side is a warming/storage and the other side is the oven.
I was looking on line to try to find a picture of a stove my late husband and I bought in 1953 – a GE that had a deep well cooker on the back left side and came across your blog. This is exactly the same one we had. It had the oven on the right side and drawers on the left could hold pots and pans as I recall. I cooked on it for 10 years before we built our first home.Thanks for the post – this brought back a lot of memories.
Thank you for your article. We recently bought one of these ranges and I was also having a terrible time finding out what year it was from. It’s been a few years since you’ve written this, so I’m wondering how you’ve enjoyed it? With a family of 5, we were slightly concerned about oven size as well, but we never really cook more than one pan at a time anyway. Thanks again for the info!
Thanks for the comment, Niki. Unfortunately, we had to part with the stove a few years back. There were some components that malfunctioned, and I was not able to fix them nor find replacements. The original wiring was also starting to become very dangerous, so my wife and I decided to part with it. This stove was such an awesome kitchen appliance. We used the deep well for boiling and as a deepfryer. We never had an issue with the oven being smaller. Glad you found the post helpful.