Still repairing in a throwaway society (11/23/05)

Less than two generations ago, the streets of American towns were lined with repair shops.

And even though we now have an economy which makes goods so inexpensively that it’s often cheaper to replace than repair, it’s still possible, with a little searching, to get things fixed.

Two Portland businesses — House of Time and Manor Foot Care — typify a business era gone by.

Gary Williams, who has operated House of Time from a shop behind his West Main Street home in Portland since the late 1970s, specializes in repair of antique and high-quality clocks, but has also diversified into the repair and sale of computers.

The Manor family, which has owned its shop at 115 N. Meridian St. since the mid-1980s, will fix, repair and alter a variety of items, including, but not limited to, shoes.

Both Williams and Dianna Manor, who began working in the store in the 1960s when it was owned by LaDoyt Bubp, say they enjoy the challenge of attempting to repair a valued item.

“The main thing with me is the challenge. I think, ‘I can make that look good again,’” Dianna Manor says.

The store is owned by Randy Manor, Dianna’s son. Gerald Manor, Dianna’s husband, also works part-time at the store, running an antique machine that sews new soles on shoes. Because so many shoes have molded rubber soles that cannot be replaced, the number of sole replacements has dropped dramatically.

“It’s just amazing the change. When I first started, LaDoyt would do eight soles a day,” Dianna Manor says. “The name (of the store) should be changed; we just never did.”

Although shoes — including the sale of new shoes, repair and dyeing — are still a part of the overall business, they are a shrinking part of the mix.

Dianna Manor, who began working for Bubp in 1969 four hours a day as a sales clerk, says she will tackle almost any repair/sewing job, such as zippers, upholstery and leather. On a recent afternoon, she showed several jobs on her to-do list, including cutting six feet off the length of a volleyball net and re-sewing the seams, refurbishing a double saddle motorcycle seat and making repairs to a trampoline.

“Anything people think of and come in, we’ll try to fix it,” she says. “We have people say, ‘we don’t know what we’d do if you leave.’ We tell them we’re trying to hang on.”

Manor Foot Care has been a family business for years — even before it had the family name. Randy Manor, who learned shoe repair from Bubp, eventually bought the business and was an owner-operator for several years before moving. He currently lives near Dayton, Ohio, and leaves business operations to his mom and dad.

Williams, who turned to clock-making and repair when he was laid off from Sheller-Globe in the mid-1970s, agrees with Manor’s love of the challenge.

“I enjoy working on a difficult clock ... because of the mind games,” he says. “Remembering how you took it apart so you can remember how to put it back together. It’s a mind challenge. It’s sort of like playing with a 1500-piece puzzle. Everyone ought to have something physically and mentally challenging.”

Williams, who says the first clock he ever worked on was an 1692 model made in England, says there’s no such thing as a “typical” customer.

“I’ll do about anything a customer wants me to do, as long as he’s willing to pay the price. When I come out (to the shop), I’d rather work on something that will be worth it when I’m done,” says Williams, who admits that he sometimes intentionally over-prices repairs on cheap clocks to discourage customers.

Among the challenges he faces daily is finding replacement parts for clocks that may be 100 or more years old.

Among the items in for repair in recent weeks was a clock that a customer from Berne had retrieved from a junk pile.

The clock, which was made sometime between 1870 and 1910, will be given as a present to the man’s daughter after it is refurbished, says Williams.

Although he has an appreciation for the intricacies of a finely-made clock, Williams isn’t a snob.

He says that a $10 clock from a discount store will tell time just as well.

“To each his own and his own tastes. Most people who have an antique clock don’t have it to tell time,” he says.

He says that after finishing training at Gem City College in Quincy, Ill., he considered opening a jewelry store. But facing an economy strangled by high inflation, he opted for clock-making.

“I wouldn’t have survived (with a jewelry store). I chose the cheapest thing ... and that was a clock shop,” says Williams, who also works part-time at the Redkey Post Office to “clear the cobwebs.”[[In-content Ad]]