BALDWIN (KDKA) — Hilda Geyer of Baldwin bought a brand new refrigerator 75 years ago.

Tuesday afternoon, her nephew was rewarded for getting rid of it. Richard Linnert is the lucky winner of “Pennsylvania’s Oldest Refrigerator Contest.”

“A $1,000 gift card from Sears for being the oldest refrigerator in the state,” Duquesne Light spokesman Brian Knavish said as he presented Linnert with his reward, at his home in Baldwin. “That’s in addition to a $250 gift card for being the oldest refrigerator in Duquesne Light’s territory.”

The winner’s Frigidare is one of 18 thousand units recycled between April and August. Those old models can add $150 a year to your energy bill.

“You call Duquesne Light,” Knavish says, “they come with JACO Environmental Recycling Company to pick up your refrigerator and they actually pay you $35 for your trouble.”

Richard Linnert became reacquainted with the old appliance when he brought his house from his aunt in 1998. It was still down in the basement.

“When I was a kid,” he recalls, “my mother would bring us down here to the house, and my aunt would say, ‘Go get yourself a pop.’

“So we’d go down and get a pop out, and go outside. We didn’t think anything about it. It’s just a ‘frigerator.’ Refrigerator, unless you’re form Pittsburgh, it’s a ‘frigerator.’”

He says he switched from pop to beer, before he pulled the plug a couple of years ago and learned the value of recycling.

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