As my last post, “the factory worker” ended, I was back on the pavements looking for work. If you haven’t read that piece, you really should go back and do that now before you read this one. It was late Spring 1978, I was living in downtown Columbia, Missouri. A couple months shy of my 21st birthday. Confused and feeling very alone. I’ll just leave it there.
So I headed out early that morning, once again for Ernie’s breakfast counter with Tribune in hand and in search of direction and purpose. Or at least a paycheck.
At the counter I was busy perusing the classifieds, Help Wanted, and with my trusty red pen I circled a few offerings. A somewhat heavy older guy sat next to me sipping his coffee. The waitress sat down his breakfast.
“Can you pass the salt and pepper?”
“Sure”
As I went back to the paper he asked, “Looking for a job?”
I wasn’t (at least not back then) in the habit of talking to strangers in diners, but I said yes, that was indeed what I was doing.
“What line of work are you in, young man?”
He was playing with me. Any fool could see I was still more a kid than a “working man”.
“Honestly, I’m just seeing what ads catch my eye.”
“Hmph. Seems like you oughta have a better plan than that. You got any experience at anything?”
I told him I was a student at Mizzou, but was planning on taking some time off from school.
“Nothing wrong with that. What are you studying?” He continued to eat his breakfast, and just then mine arrived as well.
“I’m an Electrical Engineering major”, I said as I started to cut up my eggs.
He stopped looked at me, sizing me up. “No kidding? You any good at it? By the way, my name’s Wayne.” He offered me his hand.
I reached out and shook it. “John”.
He pressed the question again. “So really, do you know anything about electronics? No offense but I’m guessing a lot of those kids over in that engineering school of yours aren’t worth a plug nickel when it comes to actually knowing anything useful.“ Then he laughed.
Now I was curious where he was going with this. So I said, “Yeah, I think I know a thing or two.”
He asked if I like to “Mess around with electronics?” , and added, “You know …. as a hobby?”
I said, “Yeah. I’ve always played around building stuff and doing electronics experiments. My dad brought home an old tube-style photo-electric eye from the factory where he works, and I played around a lot with that. You know, having it turn on lights and turn off things. A few years ago I built my own stereo amp. It was from a kit, but I did some custom modifications to the preamp.”
He seemed interested.
I said, “When I was a Boy Scout I built an electric motor out of a 2×4, some spike nails and a spool of copper wire.” That seemed to REALLY impress him.
He’d stopped eating. “So you know how to solder?”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “Yes, I can solder.” I’d been soldering since I was in third grade, helping my dad with some of his kitchen-table repair projects. One of my favorite memories of my dad was me sitting on his lap as a little kid, he taught me a visual trick to remember Ohm’s law. … “E over I R” , And I remember him teaching me the mnemonic device to remember the resistor color band values before I went off to junior High. It’s how you figure out a resistor’s value. “Bad Boys Race Our Young Girls, But Violet Generally Wins”. (Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White).
I was born to be a geek.
So, Wayne asked another question, “You know anything about TV’s?”
“Yes … a bit.”
Wayne was smiling. “Well, I own a TV shop around the corner, and I’ve been looking for someone to help me in the shop with repairs, and help out on Service Calls. You interested? You look like you’re strong enough to help carry big TV’s”
“Yes sir, I’m interested.”
It was the easiest I’ve ever gone from introduction to job offer, before or since.
We finished our breakfast, and he paid for mine. I thanked him. Then I walked with him the two blocks to his shop.
On the way, he asked me to tell him about that “2×4 electric motor.”
“I’ve been told that I was the only kid in Boy Scouts in my hometown to get both “Electricity” and “Electronics” merit badges. I made the motor for the Electricity badge. The 2×4 was just the base. I bent nails and wrapped them with wire to be the rotor and windings. Two more nails provided the supports that it all rotated on. For the Electronics bade, I made a thing called “The impossible circuit”. If you trace out the wiring it seems like there is no way it should work. The “secret” that made it seem impossible was diodes hidden inside the insulation on the wires.”
He laughed and said, “Well, Boy Scout, that sounds pretty neat.” By the time we got to the shop, he’d told me the hourly rate he was willing to pay, and I took the job.
From then on, I think all ever called me was “Boy Scout”.
“Hey Boy Scout, take these old TV’s out to the dumpster and throw them away.” Or “Come on Boy Scout, we have a service call to go on.”
Wayne’s shop was just a tiny little store-front with a counter and cash drawer, and shelves on either side with TV’s. Some were for sale, some were waiting on someone to come pick them up and pay for the repair. There were some few new ones, but mostly he sold used TV’s out of the storefront. There was an old “His Master’s Voice” RCA sign, yellowed with age, hanging behind the counter.
In the back though, that was where the magic happened … if your idea of magic is taking old non-functioning TV’s and making them work 
like new again. There was a work bench with three work-stations. Each station was outfitted with tools and meters and such. And yes, each one had a soldering station. There was a big old console “tube tester” for vacuum tubes against one wall, and shelves with boxes of new RCA brand tubes. Most TV’s that came into the shop for repair in those days still had vacuum tubes.
The opposite wall had filing cabinets FULL of “Sam’s Photofact” schematics of TV’s. “Howard W. Sam’s” was a company that published aftermarket schematics and tech manuals on a variety of TV models and other electronics.
There was a clunky old oscilloscope on a cart that could be wheeled from one workstation to the next. And there were dozens …. Dozens .. of old TV’s in various states of disrepair. Each one had a tag on it with the name and phone number of the owner, and maybe a description of the problem.
A few times a day on a typical day, Wayne would call out … “Hey Boy Scout, run over to Phillips (the local electronics and electrical supply store), and bring me back three 6J6’s.” 6J6 was a common vacuum tube. Or “Hey Boy Scout, go see if Philips has a Sams #1775 schematic.” And whatever the chore, it was always. “Have them put it on my tab.”
Phillips was only a couple of blocks away, so I just walked over there and back. Behind the counter at Phillips, I always had the sense they were chuckling about “big Wayne” having found this snot-nosed kid to run his errands.
My job besides being a gopher, was to try to “fix TV’s”. This wasn’t as big a challenge as you might think. In those days TV’s were pretty simple animals. There was the tuner section (where you manually changed channels) there were the Horizontal control/synch circuits and the separate Vertical control/synch circuits. There was the high-voltage section and the flyback transformer, and the picture tube and electron gun control circuits. There was the power supply. Most brands of TV’s didn’t have too much difference in the basic design, though the actual circuits were all a little different.
Sort of contrary to what you might think, the TV’s that simply “did not work”….. that is, the ones where the customer would say “It just doesn’t come on at all!” … those were usually the simplest to fix. Often a blown fuse or maybe a bad diode in the power rectifier, or a burnt out circuit breaker.
The more maddening ones were the newer “solid state” TV’s that didn’t utilize vacuum tubes at all. Maddening because they were made of modular circuit boards that you unplugged, replaced, and voila … fixed. I wanted to (and was ABLE to) fix many of those modules, but Wayne wasn’t interested in that. He just wanted me to swap out the circuit boards, if it worked with the new boards, then call it “fixed”, charge the customer the price of the new board and move on to the next TV. Assembly-line high-volume TV repair. He made more money that way, and it was off the bench quicker.
Now let me say this about Wayne. I learned really quickly that he was more interested in making a buck than he was in just being helpful to folks. There were some things he did that were probably pretty shrewd, and evidence of a man who knew a thing or two about marketing and business and how to make a buck. There were some things he did that fell in a real gray area, and I wasn’t sure if he was being smart, or a crook. And then, there were other things he did that were simply dishonest.
I’ll break some of them down for you so you can see what I mean.
The Shrewd (if more than a bit smarmy and creepy).
One day just a week or so before the new school year began at the local colleges, Wayne gave me a stack of flyers and asked me to go over to Stephens College campus and put one up on every bulletin board I could find, including in the dormitories. Stephen’s was a girl’s college and had a reputation for attracting rich young girls who were interested in the arts. He also gave me instructions to go and put the same flyers on the bulletin boards in the GIRL’S dorms and any Sorority Houses that I wanted to venture into on the Mizzou campus. Just the GIRL’S dorms, he said, not the guys. The flyers were for Wayne’s shop and offered “FREE Rabbit Ears! with any TV sold.” And “Free set-up in your dorm!”
Now listen up, boys and girls … “Rabbit Ears” were the antennas that sat on top of old TV’s and help you pull in better reception for the stations in range. No cable in those days. You HAD to have an antenna. You could buy a new set of rabbit ears at Phillips for about $10, which is exactly we did, then Wayne would bundle them with a new portable TV, and mark the price of the TV’s in his shop up by $30 each.
Wayne, who was old enough to be dad or grandpa to any of those young women, and who was married to boot, was far more interested in having the “cute little co-eds” wander into the shop so he could flirt with them (he said as much), and never failed to make lewd comments about them to this “Boy Scout” after they left. And, he got to sell them a TV. Free Rabbit Ears!!!. Yeah, It was creepy.
But I did get the benefit of being the “set up guy” for the new TV’s. I must have been in over three dozen girl’s dorm rooms that Fall, adjusting their rabbit ears. (No, that is NOT a euphemism for anything else.)
The Borderline
I can’t tell you how many times during the short time I worked there that there would be a repair that was going to be a little on the expensive side. For example, maybe the set needed a new picture tube. This is easily the most expensive thing to replace. Expensive because the picture tubes themselves aren’t cheap, and because the labor is rather involved. I got where I could swap out a picture tube, including doing the convergence, keystone adjustment, gun setup and alignment etc., within a couple hours.
By the time Wayne would figure out what his markup was going to be on the labor and parts, he would often call the customer and try to convince them to come in and buy a new set, rather than putting a “new engine in an old jalopy”. He’d point out that it wasn’t good sense to spend around $200 to fix a set (which would still have old parts in it) when they could buy a brand new one for $250. He was successful at that tactic a lot … and he had a good profit margin on the new sets. But then he’d offer to “dispose” of the old set for them. They almost always took him up on that.
We’d take it to the back of the shop and let it sit. Then, a couple weeks later after he was satisfied he’d seen the last of them, we’d go ahead and fix the old TV. He’d have maybe a max of $60 his cost in parts and two hours in the repair, and he’d put it out with his “Used DEALS!” and put a price tag of $135 on it. If someone was interested, he’d mark it down by $15, making them think they’d gotten a steal, and he would still double his money.
Just business right? I don’t know. Especially in light of the following:
The Scoundrel
As I said before, often the simpler repairs are the ones that “seem” like they’re going to be a bigger deal. This worked to Wayne’s advantage, because he could make a simple repair seem like a bigger deal.
One day, near the end of my short tenure there, I put a TV up on the bench. Opened up the back of it, and I could smell that there had been something burned. I found right away that a circuit breaker had failed. I took the old one out, got a new one out of the parts cabinet and soldered it in. Fifteen minutes tops. Our cost on the circuit breaker back then was under a buck. I fired up the set and adjusted the picture, and announced to Wayne it was fixed. He came over and asked what the problem was, and I told him.
“Hmm. I think it also needs a power output tube, Boy Scout.“
Obviously it didn’t, as the set was working just fine. I just looked at him. He reached over and unplugged the set. Then he reached into the back of it and pulled out the power tube. He smashed it on the side of the trashcan by my work station.
“See? It needs a new power tube. Run down to Phillips, Boy Scout and get a new one.” Our cost on the power tube was about $8, and Wayne marked them up to $28. He marked those 80 cent Circuit Breakers up to $12.
As I walked down there to Phillips, I thought about what had just happened.
What I knew, but what Wayne either had forgotten (or more likely just did not care) was that the TV belonged to an older woman at whose home we had picked up the set a few days before. She lived in a somewhat poorer part of town, and likely on a fixed income.
Later, when I called to tell her we had “fixed” her TV and could deliver it any time that was convenient for her, she said, “Oh fantastic. What was wrong with it?”
I looked at the ticket that Wayne had prepared. Under the description it just said, “Repaired problems in power circuit. Installed new power tube”. I swallowed hard and told her what it said, and gave her the amount.
“Well, shoot. Anyway, I’m glad you boys could fix it. When can you bring it back?”
I told her I could have it over there later that day. She asked if I could wait until Friday, as she would have gotten her Social Security check by then.
I was sick to my stomach. Because, you know, I’m a Boy Scout.
I’d like to say that was the only time I saw Wayne do something like that.
But it wasn’t.
In the end, it was precisely those sorts of things that had me give him my notice. I didn’t tell him that. I just told him I had decided to go back to work at the Golf Course. But I think he knew that those things bothered me a lot.
He said he didn’t need any notice. He went into his office and cut me a check for hours worked, and handed it to me.
“You’re a good person Boy Scout. Good luck. I hope you go back to school.”
As I walked out the front door, I glanced back and thanked him. That was the last time I ever saw him.
I did go back to work on the Golf Course. Worked for the pro, Al Chandler at the Columbia Country Club. When the golf season was over, I went to another TV shop in town, an older long-established shop, and ended up getting a much better job.
This shop was located in the first “shopping center” in town, the Parkade Plaza. It was owned by a man who was by then bored with the business and trying to make it as an oil man in Texas. He was only in the shop once a month or so. The shop was run by Wendell, who did double duty as a tech and doing front-of-store sales and in general just running things. While Wendell was often interested in knocking off early sometimes and stopping to get a beer, and though he often invited me out on the town after work, he was honest as honest could be. He had a heck of a work ethic too. The phrase “Work Hard, Play Hard” could have been written about him.
I worked there off and on for the next several years, even after going back to engineering school. Wendell thought my stories of working for Wayne were a hoot. He said he didn’t really know him, but he knew of his shop, and always figured him for a crook.
I never saw Wendell knowingly treat any customer badly. Not once.
I saw him blow up at a salesman who worked in the front of the store, and then fire him for insubordination. I was pretty sure I was going to see a fist-fight, but the salesman just cursed and spat and stormed out.
Overall we had a good crew there. Eventually Wendell bought the shop and moved it out of the mall. I got put in charge of out-call service and ended up going in and out of people’s homes to fix their televisions. Larry, who just walked in off the street one day and asked for a job, claimed to be a full-blooded Choctaw Indian from Oklahoma (and I have no reason to doubt him) was hired on not long after we moved, and became my “helper”. I probably never heard Larry string more than four words together at a time, but he was a damn good tech. There was nothing electronic that he could not fix. If I got stuck on something, Larry would come over from his workbench and take a look, grab a meter, take a measurement and point to the bad part. It was a long time ago, but I don’t remember seeing any electronics failures that Larry couldn’t troubleshoot.
I worked with Larry for about six months before I realized that he had a twin brother and a cousin that lived with him. He just didn’t offer up much information. Then, one day that sort of changed.
I also found out more or less by accident that together the three of them … Larry, his brother, and their cousin … were responsible for perhaps half or more of the marijuana sold in mid-Missouri at the time. Other stuff too. Pills and such.
Larry would come in haggard on a Monday and I’d ask him if he’d had a hard weekend? “Not really, just went down to South Texas with my brother”. Or something.
I always thought that was odd. In my world, you didn’t just “decide” one weekend to drive to El Paso and back.
One night after much cajoling from Wendell, Larry went out on the town with us. We went and got a burger and a beer at The Stein Club, and the we walked down the block to a dance club on Broadway near “The Bakery”. Can’t remember the name of the place. Before long, Larry took off his jacket, and I saw he had a handgun tucked in his pants, under the blue and white shirt that he wore more days than not. Wendell saw it too.
“Whoa dude! What are you packing that thing for?”, Wendell asked.
“Protection”
“Protection from WHAT?” Wendell asked.
“From people who want this …. “ Larry, who already had pounded down a couple of drinks in rapid succession, reached in his pocket and produced a roll of bills about 4 inches in diameter At least the bills on the outside of the roll were hundreds.
Suffice to say he did NOT make that kind of dough repairing TV’s for Wendell.
“DUDE!!! Don’t flash that around” Wendell said.
Then, “Where’d you get that kind of dough?”
“Selling drugs”.
At least Larry was honest.
One Monday morning a couple months later Larry called in and told Wendell he wouldn’t be in that day. Wendell asked why.
“I’m stuck in Las Cruces, New Mexico.”
“WHAT??? What happened?
“Um….. trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“My car got stole. My brother’s in jail.” **pause** “I gotta figure shit out. Well … bye.”
He hung up. That was the most we’d ever heard him say, and coincidentally, that was the last we ever heard from Larry.
But one day a couple weeks later two very rough looking dudes came walking in the front door of the shop, which then was located in a strip mall on the Business Loop, next to a liquor store.
“You got an Indian named Larry working here?”
Wendell said, ”Used to. He called a couple weeks ago, said he was stuck in New Mexico. Last we heard of him.”
These guys stood there for a minute, and I promise I was scared to death they were gonna start shooting up the place or something.
But one of them said, “If he comes back in, tell him that Carl needs him to call. He’ll know what it’s about.” And they left.
Wendell looked at me and just said, “Holy shit.”
Despite all that weirdness, working there and going into people’s homes all over Columbia taught me a lot and there were there were many “life lessons” I learned on that job.
One is that there are some truly amazing and wonderful people… the “salt of the earth”…. at ALL places on the social/economic spectrum. On the other hand, there are mean, nasty, self-serving people everywhere too. There are slovenly folks sometimes living in that million-dollar “mansion on the hill”, which ought to be condemned as a public health hazard. And just as surely, there are people for whom you wonder where their next meal is coming from who keep such a clean house that no stray speck of dust or piece of clutter could find a place to land.
I’ve been in the homes of people with basically nothing, who would gladly share their last morsel with you or the shirt off their backs if you needed it. The opposite is just as likely to be true … people with an air of entitlement who would never consider being spontaneously kind or giving, because to them that’s not the way their world works. I’ve tried to never forget that lesson… those contrasts.
I’ve tried to make it a point to try get to know “ordinary people” wherever I go, and to always give the new people I meet the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived my entire life in either the Midwest or the South, but my personal experience is that “good plain folks” are more often the rule than the exception.
I wrote in one blog post, called “ne’er a Rose so sweet”, about a truly remarkable experience and friendship I made while working for Wendell at that TV shop. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a read. Leave a comment or let me know what you think.
As I said, I did go back to school, and my larger circle of friends grew to include a group of people far more likely to be uplifting to my soul than Larry and his brothers.
I never fancied myself a “TV repairman” for the long haul. But it was something I was good at for the time I did it. And I continued helping friends by repairing their malfunctioning equipment for beer or for home-cooked meals for the next several years. Having a reputation as “Mr. Fix-It” brings with it its own set of rewards.
There was this girl I knew at the time, named Eileen. She would call sometimes, and say that she or one of her roommates had a non-functioning TV, blow-drier, curling iron, car stereo, headphones, or … something. MY roommate would often answer the phone, then laugh and laugh and laugh as he handed the phone to me whilst doing a pantomime of me helping Eileen return to a fully functioning state of being.
But that’s another story.
love,
John