Steve brought this little baby out with him. We both had guessed it was from the 1950s, and did a bit of research on it, but never really found one that was the same model. Apparently, there's a graphic artist/web designer out there by the name of Charles Richard Lester who collects old vacuum cleaners, and has a section on his website devoted to an online Vacuum Museum that had a lot of pictures. Other sites that showed up in Google also made reference to the guy. One picture he had looked similar, but obviously had a lot of mismatched replacement parts, and was in pretty bad shape. This one has a replacement hose and attachments, but everything else is original, and it still works just fine.

Intrigued, I emailed the guy last night and attached the picture you see here. My email didn't set off any spam alerts at his end, and the guy replied. For someone who claimed to not know much about it, he was able to pin it to 1966-1968, and even went into some detail about what the original hose and attachments looked like. I offered to let him use my picture on his website if he wished. My guess is that he won't, but it was a common courtesy to make the offer, in exchange for his consideration and reply. I'm sure if he does use the photo, he'll give it some sort of credit such as "photo courtesy of Xxxx Xxxxx."