Electronic repair

History of Employment, as of 2024

As I am seventy years old, and, as of now, will have been working in the electronics field for fifty years, I sometimes think back on the many jobs I’ve had over the years. Since those first jobs, where I started to work in the summers to buy something I might have wanted, to a lifetime occupation in the electronics industry. So, I have made a list of all the places I could think of where I have worked for at least a while. Some of these, I spent very little time there, some, many years.

I was born in 1953, and grew up in my early years in Yakima Washington, moving from there to Kennewick Washington in 1962. Then in the summer of 1965, we moved to Bellingham Washington. I would have been eleven years old when we made that move, so it was there that I would get my first jobs. While living in Bellingham, we lived in a rather remote neighborhood. That made it rather difficult to find a job other than things like a paper route or mowing lawns, both of which I did do at some point.

When I was a kid growing up there, by far the easiest job to find each summer, was berry picking. The local berry farms would, starting the first day of summer vacation, start running old used up school bus’s out to the residential neighborhoods to pick up any kids who were interested in working in the berry fields. That probably wouldn’t work today on many levels.  First, right after summer started, you could pick strawberries, then after about a month of that, raspberries. I remember thinking towards the end of each school year that I would make my fortune picking berries each summer. Then, after a few days of picking, I would remember how much I hated that kind of work, and quit. My sister would continue all summer and make pretty good money. I would return to my standby, and mow lawns for any of the neighbors who needed my services, for a little spending money.

One summer when I was about thirteen, I decided I needed a better summer job. So I became the local area Fuller Brush salesperson. That required a lot of going door to door showing my samples and demonstrating their products, that was after giving the potential customer a small free gift. I soon found out that the cost of the samples and free gifts left little profit for me. And how serious did people get when a young boy came and tried to demonstrate cleaning products. I suppose some of the people felt sorry for me, and so bought some of my products. That summer wasn’t very profitable for me but was a good learning experience. After that summer, I slowed down on the door to door sales and soon after quite the Fuller Brush sales job altogether. At the end of that summer I had saved enough money to purchase my first big purchase, half the cost of contact lenses. I wore then all my freshman year. They hurt each and every day. After the end of that school year, I went back to wearing glasses.

The next summer, I worked for my dad helping with his construction business. I really don’t remember that much about that, other than performing menial tasks on new home construction like installing insulation, roofing and siding.

The summer after that, I wanted something else. I had a couple of friends who had Bellingham Herald paper routes. They were ideal, as at that time the Herald was an evening paper Monday through Friday, then a morning paper on Sunday. Since nearly everyone in the area received the Herald, the routes were quite local and short for the delivery person. Those Herald routes were also very sought after and hard to get. So one summer, I decided to get a paper route of my own, but the only thing available was for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, or as it was known, the PI. The problem with the PI route was, it was a seven day a week, morning paper. It was also much larger than the Herald, and instead of most everyone getting the paper, maybe only one in twenty people got it. So the routes covered a much larger area. By the end of that summer, I was so sick of getting up every morning at 5:00AM seven days a week to ride my old beater bicycle for about eight miles to deliver the heavy papers, I could hardly wait to give it up. It was one of the worst jobs I can remember as a kid. The only good thing was it left me with enough time in the afternoons to still mow a few local lawns. At the end of that summer, I purchased a Schwinn Varsity ten speed bicycle with my summer money.

The summer between my junior and senior year, I got one of the more interesting jobs of my youth. I started working at the Motorvue drive in Movie Theater in Bellingham over by the airport. This was an interesting job for me, since I was not only interested in movies, but I was totally intrigued with the operation of the projectors. After doing the required tasks of my job for the evening, I would spend most of my time in the projection booth. The projector operator would show me how everything worked, and eventually even let me do tasks like change the projectors at the end of a movie reel. In those days, there were two projectors sitting side by side, a few feet apart. They were arc light projectors, so the arc had to be set up and adjusted before the next reel was started. The movie reels were 35mm film reels, and lasted only about twenty minutes. There was a pair of shutters in front of the projector lenses that allowed only one projector to show at any one time. When the running projector would start to run low on film, you would look out at the screen. Then you would see what looked like a defect in the upper right corner of the film on the screen. That meant you needed to be ready with the second projector and the shutter control. Then the distortion showed again in the corner about 20 seconds later. At that point, there was always a major scene change and sound change. When you saw it that second time, you started the second projector as you changed the shutter over to the second projector. The movie moved on with nobody even knowing anything had happened. You then rewound the reel on the other projector, replaced that reel in its box and put the next reel onto that projector for the next change. I was really intrigued with this and got to be friends with the projectionists. I learned some of the ins and outs of the drive in movie business and had a good time. At the end of the summer, I remember we showed the movie “Woodstock”. We had quite an uprising of Native Americans who attended the movie that we had to put down. While we were doing that, some of them attacked some of the workers in the snack bar. Of course, the manager thought the two of us working that night should have been able to handle those two crises at the same time and decided to punish us somehow. I don’t remember what he wanted to do, but since the summer was about over anyway, I went on my way as did the other employee that worked that night.

  When 1972 began, the Viet Nam war was still going on, and so the draft was also going on. At the first of the year, the draft lottery was announced. My birthday gave me number 93. That meant that I would be going into the military, unless something changed. That meant getting drafted into the Army, that is, unless I decided to enlist with one of the other branches. All this became the topic of discussion at school among a bunch of us. We had heard that the military had come up with a new plan. In this new plan, a group of friends could join up together, and then serve together. I’m sure it probably only would have been through basic training, but of course, we figured we would be able to serve together for our entire enlistment. Four of us went to the local Navy recruitment center and asked about this plan. We were told that before they could promise anything, we would have to go to Seattle and get our medical examinations and take some aptitude tests. So a few days later, the four of us that wanted to go in together, went to Seattle to take our tests. They sent us down to Seattle on a Greyhound bus, and then put us up for the night at the Mayflower Hotel. The Mayflower was a really seedy place in the downtown area. When we checked in, we were told we had to be ready in the morning to go get tested at 6:00AM. So, the four of us stayed out all night running around town trying to not get into too much trouble. After all, none of us had much money with us. We must have stayed out until about 4:00 in the morning, so we were really dragging when we got on the bus at 6:00 to go to the testing center. When we got there, there must have been more than a thousand recruits in the building. The first thing they did was have us all strip down and go through the physical. After that, we got dressed and went through a whole battery of tests to see where our abilities might lay. After all the tests, they gave us lunch. While we were eating lunch and discussing the tests, someone came over on the PA system. They requested that Bruce Nelson come to some officer’s office. I figured I did something wrong, as I was the only person’s name called since we had been there. I went to the officer’s office to see what I had done wrong. He said that I had scored in the top 2% of the nation in mechanical ability. He said they wanted to send me to school to become a nuclear physicist, and serve on a nuclear submarine. That meant I wouldn’t serve at all with my friends, but it sounded like a very interesting offer. I went home and thought about it. Soon after, the draft got cancelled. I never went into the service, as it really wasn’t that popular at that time. I have often wondered what would have happened if I would have gone that direction.

As my senior year was wrapping up in 1972, I got approached by a friend of mine who lived in my neighborhood that was a year older than I was. He and his two brothers were fishermen and gillnetted both in the local waters in the spring and fall, and in southeastern Alaska in the summer. It just so happened that the previous fall he had purchased a thirty six foot boat from an auction in Canada. That meant he could sell his old twenty nine foot Bristol Bay conversion he had used for the past few years. I guess he hadn’t figured on not being able to sell it, and by the time he was getting close to get ready to leave for Alaska, it was obvious it wasn’t going to sell. He offered to let me go with him to Alaska fishing. He would supply the boat and the license, I would fish with his old boat and we would hopefully both make some money. This meant that the last few months of spare time I had before graduation was spent getting the boat ready to go north for the summer. The day after graduation, we both headed out to the great white north to make our fortunes. His newer boat was capable of cruising at about eight knots, while my older boat could only go about four knots. Since we were running late and wanted to get there faster, we dropped some tires down between the two boats, tied the bows together and were able to maintain about seven knots with both boats running. This seemed like a good idea, as we could both get into his nicer boat and just cruise along. Like I said, it seemed like a good idea, until in the middle of the night just north of Victoria BC, we hit a large ferry boat wake. My old boat was a double ender with low sides and his bigger boat had ironbark guards down the sides. When we hit the wake, the tires popped out and the low sides of my boat hammered against the guards on his boat severely damaging the side of my boat and knocking out a lot of caulking. Although we attempted several times to repair the boat and tried to keep it pumped out, it finally went down near Alert Bay BC. We never even got our feet wet and were able to get everything of value off the old boat and into the hold of the new boat. We continued up to Ketchikan, fished a few days and then he took me to Prince Rupert and I flew home. So that summer job was quite a flop. I did eventually get a small amount of his insurance settlement, but it was still a lot of time and energy spent for almost no money. 

Now I was out of high school, and needed to figure what I wanted to do with my life from then on.

  The first thing I did after returning from my Alaska adventure was to buy a car and get a job. I bought a 1958 Chevy coupe from a friends parents and I got a recommendation for a job at a cannery that was hiring from a friend from high school. I applied for a laborer job at Kelly Farquar, a cannery in Ferndale. The opening was for a variety of shifts, from day shifts to graveyard shifts. I absolutely hated the job, it was just the most menial labor. After about two weeks, I was called in to a day shift. I thought that might be a better thing than the late shifts I had been working. I also found out I was going to be working with my friend who worked there, whom I had not even seen since I had started there. I went in thinking it could be a good day at work. They gave each of us a snow shovel and told us to unload an entire railroad boxcar full of rock salt into large totes on pallets. We were not given any personal protective items. It was a horrible job. It took us about fourteen hours, both of us quit the next day.

  My real interest at that time was to get a job as a mechanic at a gas station. This was when gas stations not only pumped your gas, but checked your tires, checked your oil, washed your windows and checked your battery. These gas stations at the time also had service bays and performed any number of minor service and repair tasks. Another friend of mine from high school had gotten a job at Harry’s Shell in Bellingham. It was a fairly large gas station right off the Iowa street freeway exit in Bellingham that was open twenty four hours a day. They performed routine service and repairs and with their close proximity to the off ramp, they saw a lot of travelers that required assistance. I was hired there that summer to pump gas, do light mechanics work and do misc. tasks around the station. I worked the shifts that were needed to fill in for the guys on their days off. That meant I worked two evening shifts, two graveyard shifts and one day shift each week. The day shift was far and away the busiest shift and was on Sunday. The other two shifts were slower and that meant I could put my 1958 Chevy coupe on the lift, buy parts for it wholesale and fix up my car. One of my good friends would often come in and we would spend whatever time was required to service any problems with my car and put aftermarket parts on it to fix it up. 

  I remember one Sunday, my friend who worked there and I were working the day shift when a 1959 Pontiac Bonneville convertible came in with Arizona plates. It wasn’t in great shape and the driver looked like he was about thirty years old and not at all well-dressed. He pulled in, had us fill up the car then asked us to change his oil. He told us he was traveling up here from Arizona, and it was time to get the service done. Since it wasn’t real busy, we talked with the guy while we performed the service work. He evidently thought we did a good job, because he asked us to come down and go to work for him at his large Shell station in Phoenix. He pulled out two fifty dollar bills and said he would give them to us if we promised to be there in a week. We talked about it but decided we didn’t really believe his story. We declined the money, he paid his bill, gave us each a couple of bucks as a tip and left. We laughed about that for weeks after that. More about that later.

  Close to the end of that summer, a guy came in with a Rambler on Sunday that needed an exhaust pipe from the engine back to the muffler. The guy had called in and talked to the owner a few days earlier, so we had gotten the pipe in stock from the auto parts supplier. All we had to do was to install the pipe and put the muffler back on. When we pulled the pipe off the muffler, the whole end of the muffler fell apart. I called the owner of the car and told him it would need to be replaced also. He said he was only paying for the pipe and that was all the station owner said he needed. I finally had to run over to Kmart and bought a muffler for the car that they had in stock. That was way back when Kmart sold car parts and actually did automotive repairs. I installed the $11.00 muffler and gave the guy back his car. The next day, I went into the station and told the owner what had happened, and asked to be reimbursed. He refused to reimburse me for the muffler. I told him just what I thought of him, quit and drove off. Again, I was without a job.

  I got kind of depressed after losing that job. I guess I then realized that those were the kind of jobs I was going to have until I figured out what I really wanted to do for a living. I talked to my father about my dilemma, he said he knew a guy who had a business in Bellingham, and that he was looking for some help. Little did I know that going to work for him would send my working career in a totally different direction than I ever thought it would.

  That next job was working for the guy my father knew, at Manchester’s Sharpening service in Bellingham. George Manchester was an older guy who owned this business. He would sharpen just about anything, from saw blades, lawn mower blades, knives, scissors, most anything that needed to be sharpened. In fact his motto was “we sharpen everything but your wits”. He also filled, repaired and sold all kinds of fire extinguishers and sold distilled water. To say that “Crazy Man-chester” As he would be known as, was eccentric would be an understatement. The first day I worked for him, I remember going to lunch. Like any other kid my age in Bellingham, I went to Herfy’s, the local Drive in for lunch. I had a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke. When I returned from lunch and went back to work, he came over to me and asked what I had eaten for lunch. I said that I had eaten a hamburger, he responded by telling me how terrible it was that I had eaten burned flesh, and nobody should ever eat that. I then proceeded to tell him I had eaten French fried potatoes, his response to that was that nobody should ever eat cooked vegetables. He then asked me what I washed it all down with. I decided that if I told him Coke, he would go off again, so I lied and told him I washed it down with a glass of milk. That was worse than the other items. He ranted and asked me if I was ever weaned, then he proceeded to explain to me that the white part of the zits that teenagers got was from milk. His response as to what I should drink, was that nobody should drink anything except distilled water or beer. I was, of course, too young to drink the beer. During the next month or so that I worked there full time, he was constantly trying to catch me doing things he didn’t approve of. There was a second worker there, Bruce Zeeger, that only worked half a day. I decided that I wanted that schedule so that I could work only half of the day, then the other worker could work the other half. When I suggested that to the owner, he said that could happen under one circumstance. That was if I, like the other worker, attended Bellingham Technical School half day. The next day, I went to the Tech school to sign up for a class. I asked to sign up for auto mechanics. I was told the class was full. I then asked to sign up for auto body, I was again told it was full. I then asked what classes might be available. The response was there was an opening in the electronics technology class. I really had no interest in electronics, but really wanted to put in less hours with my crazy boss, so I signed up. That allowed me to work only a half day, so I went to work in the morning then went to school in the afternoon. I got to be friends with Bruce, the other worker. We usually saw each other for a few minutes around noon as we passed by and we worked together occasionally when school was out. We both joked and laughed about Crazy Man-chester.

  Mr. Manchester had one of us daily, pick up the food garbage from the restaurant across the street in five gallon buckets. He took it home, although we never really knew why. On occasion, we would be asked to do some work at his house. I recall one day we were both working, it must have been during a school break. It had snowed that morning. His was an older house on a main street in the older south side of Bellingham known as Fairhaven. It was a rather narrow house with a front door on the main street. It was rather deep and as the house went back, the property dropped off leaving the basement of the house open to the back yard. At the back of the house on the main floor was a back door out of the kitchen. It was in the back, a good ten feet above the ground. There was no deck or porch of any kind, just a door leading to nowhere. When you entered into the house, it was completely packed with old lawn mowers, fire extinguishers and boxes full of papers. The only inhabitable rooms were the kitchen, the bathroom and one bedroom. In the basement there was the same bunch of stuff, except down there were stacks of beer cases full of bottles full of his urine. Come to find out he kept it, who knows why. Anyway, back to the snowy day. 

He had arrived that day at work really happy because, he had been dumping the food garbage he had been collecting onto a big pile in his side yard. Again, who knows why. He had no animals or even a garden, he didn’t even maintain his lawn. He had come in happy because after the snow, he said the birds had no place to go to get food. Since his rotting food was making heat, the snow wouldn’t stick to his garbage pile, so his feathered friends had a place to land and get food. He was so proud of that. He sent us to his house to do something, I forget what it was, but when we walked into his kitchen, we got a surprise. On his kitchen table was a pellet gun and a box of pellets. On top of his garbage pile were a number of dead birds. Evidently, he had spent the morning shooting his feathered friends. 

Not long after that, Bruce and I passed each other as we were coming and going around noon. I had a new 8-track tape that we sat in my car and listened to it for way to long, making him late to work. The next day, the owner wanted to talk to us. He decided we were getting to be friends, so one of us had to go. I had the least seniority, so it was me. That was the only time I ever got fired from a job. 

The good part of this was that I had taken a real interest in the electronics class I was taking, and really needed to pursue going to school full time and since I had few expenses and lived with my parents. It really helped. I did get a part time job with a neighbor who owned a janitorial service. I worked nights for him on and off for a few years cleaning restaurants at night. This was now early in 1973 I worked for him most of that summer as well.

At the end of summer, I returned to Tech School for my second year, but after a few months, a friend from Tech school named Alvin and I, decided we were tired of Bellingham and decided to move to California. My older brother had fairly recently gotten married and moved to Santa Cruz and was selling cars there. We packed up Alvin’s old car, I sold my two vehicles, and we headed off to California. When we got there, I found that my brother and his wife were living in a small one bedroom apartment. For about a week, we crashed in his front room. My friend immediately found a job in a cannery, but after a week, decided to go back home. I, on the other hand, went out to get a job doing electronics repair. I had no luck, as you needed experience to get a job and a job to get that experience. I got a number of odd jobs, mostly doing things for Prolo Chevrolet where my brother worked. I drove cars all over California for dealer trades and did some detailing. My brother and his wife and I found a two bedroom apartment. My plan was to stay there in Santa Cruz and eventually find a decent job.

The one job that I found while I was in Santa Cruz, was delivering coupon books for a company. They advertised they wanted to hire people to deliver these book, but in actuality, they called people, asked if they were interested in a coupon book, If they didn’t hang up on them or yell at them, then they must be interested. So my job was take them a coupon book and talk them into buying it, and paying me the money for it. They sold for $15.00. They would give me ten of them for the day along with a bunch of names and addresses. At the end of the day I would return any unsold books, and pay $8.00 for each one I sold that day. I did ok with that, but it required a lot of driving around. I did that for a few weeks. 

Then one day, my brother and I went to lunch at the pier in Santa Cruz. It was in the middle of December of 1973. After lunch, we returned to the Chevrolet dealership. There was a guy there from GMAC financing. He had just been given a car that they had to repossess. The problem was, that for some reason the car had to be returned to the office in Wichita Kansas in three days. He had no idea how he was going to get that done. My brother said he had a guy, me, who could do it, but it was going to be kind of expensive. The guy proceeded to make some phone calls, then agreed to hire me to drive the car.

 I had no idea what kind of vehicle I would be driving all this distance. When I did, I found out it was a 1973 Chevy El Camino SS. The guy gave me a couple hundred bucks in cash up front, and sent me on my way. I packed up some clothes and headed out. On my way south out of San Jose, I saw a guy about my age hitchhiking. I decided to pick him up. He was heading to Phoenix. He was a nice enough guy and was glad to get a ride all the way to Phoenix. At least it was someone to talk to on a long trip. When we got to Phoenix, he found us a place where we could spend the night for free in a church sponsored hostile. We got there late in the afternoon and since I was getting paid by the mile, we decided to cruise town in my cool El Camino SS. While we were cruising around we went past a large Shell station. Alongside the station sat a 1959 Pontiac Bonneville convertible. I got a good laugh about that, I guess what the guy was telling us was true after all. 

The next morning, we went our separate ways, and I headed east. As I was leaving, I saw another guy about my age hitchhiking, so I picked him up. He turned out to be a really nice guy. He was attending Seminary College in San Francisco, and was going home to Oklahoma City to surprise his parents for Christmas. He was a few years older than I was and had really long hair. As we traveled, he offered to help with the gas. I told him that was covered, but I did let him buy dinner once. 

When we were in the panhandle of Texas, we went into a diner for dinner. We got the whole treatment. People asking if he was my girlfriend, and offered to do any number of things to us. We actually just picked up our food and left. That was the only time I’ve ever felt that way. I was running ahead of time, so I actually took him to his parents’ house and dropped him off. I went the rest of the way to Wichita by myself, dropped off the car, they paid me the money, then told me they would take me to the airport so I could return to Santa Cruz. 

At that time, they inquired if I would do one more job for them. They had a car that had been repossessed in Vail Colorado. It likewise needed to be driven to Wichita. I had nothing else pressing, so I agreed. They flew me to Denver and I caught a Bus to Vail. When I got there, I found out the car had a problem and wouldn’t be ready for a couple of days. I would get paid to sit tight in Vail for a couple of days. I checked into the Poor Richards Inn. It was the cheapest place I could find in Vail. I was trying to get the most income from this job, so I was trying to keep my costs to a minimum. 

At Poor Richards, you paid for your room, they then handed you a bag full of sheets, blankets, towels and a pillow. There were six bunks per room and two bathrooms per floor. It was pretty basic, but I was the only person in the room. The next day, I rented some skis and went skiing. When I returned that evening to my room, there was another guy there who was on a skiing vacation from St. Lewis. We started talking, and soon decided to go into Vail and get some dinner. While we were at dinner, we found out that there was a foosball tournament going on. He asked me if I played foosball, I said no. He told me that he was really good. We signed up. All he did was whenever he was about to score, he would give me a nudge, I would raise up my players and all I would hear was a thwack, as the ball hit the goal. We played about twenty games, and won the tournament

 The next day, he went skiing, and I went and picked up my car. It just so happened that a big blizzard was coming in and I wanted to try to get ahead of it. The trip with that car, a 1971 Buick Skylark, was possibly the worst time of driving in the snow I would ever experience. But I made it back to Wichita. The guy at GMAC then gave me more money for that trip and took me to the airport. He asked me where I wanted to go so he could purchase me a ticket. I hemmed and hawed a little then decided to fly back to Seattle so I could go home for Christmas. I called a friend in Bellingham from Denver and arranged for him to come and pick me up from the airport and deliver me home to Bellingham. It was good to be home for Christmas.

My plan was to stay a couple of weeks in Bellingham, then return to Santa Cruz. That never happened. I guess I was kind of homesick and missed Bellingham and my friends. After a week or so, I decided I would stay in this area. My dad, who at that time was running a business college, got me into a government program that allowed me to go back to school and get paid for it, as long as I didn’t live at home. I rented a trailer to live in in Mt. Vernon Washington, and started taking electronics classes at Skagit Valley Community College. At the same time, I also had a Bellingham Herald motor paper route to help pay any bills I had.

I was happy to be back in school, although at Skagit, I also had to take classes that were required that had nothing to do with electronics. The good news was that they offered a weekend class in TV repair. There were about six of us that were in that class, and the instructor was really good. All of us in that class became friends and started to hang out together. One day, while we were taking our lunch break during our TV repair class, we were sitting around talking. A guy in the class talked about a TV repair shop in a small town where his wife had grown up, that was for sale. The owner was retiring. He said the town was so small and remote, his wife no longer wanted to live there, but the shop was a good deal. The same guy who knew about the shop for sale was a guy in the class that I got to know quite well. He was an exception in the class, as he wasn’t attending other classes at Skagit Valley college. I also found out that he actually had a TV repair shop. It was in a small cabin like building next to his house, but it was a TV repair shop. That was what all of us in the class wanted, to run a repair shop. The guy must have thought I knew what I was doing because he hired me to help him in his shop. The problem was he now had two techs that didn’t really know much. Things there didn’t really go very well. I think I worked for him for a couple of months. He couldn’t ever seem to afford to pay me. Eventually, it just didn’t make sense to drive all the way to his shop without getting paid on a regular basis and I just went in to help him less and less.

In June of 1974 I made a real mistake and got married. About a month later, we had just gotten our wedding pictures back and it was the Fourth of July weekend. My then wife wanted to show off the pictures to all her relatives. Her direct family had gone to her uncle’s house for the long weekend in Clallam Bay Washington to go fishing and to visit family members there. We decided to go there also, just a day later. 

When we arrived at her uncle’s house, I was given the tour of the two little towns there that were only a couple of miles apart, Clallam Bay and Sekiu. While driving between the two towns, there was a building that housed both a tavern and a TV repair shop. The repair shop was closed. Suddenly a light bulb came on in my head. This was the shop that the guy in the TV repair class had been talking about. I asked my wife’s uncle about it, he knew the guy rather well and drove me to the guy’s house. He went down and opened up the shop and showed it to me. I was immediately sold, now all I needed was to find the $4000.00 to buy it. 

When we returned to Bellingham, I went to the bank that I used and asked for a loan, they pretty much told me to pound sand. I had no other real options, and I figured the deal was dead. My new wife went to her dad and managed to get him to agree to loan us the money. Within about two weeks we were packed up and ready to move to Clallam Bay to run Clallam Electronics. 

As we were ready to leave, I came to the sudden realization that I would need a service van. I went over to my old boss from the janitorial service. He gave me a great deal on the van I preferred to drive while I worked there. We were now all set. Now all I needed to do was actually fix some TVs. The repair shop was quite well equipped for both TV and two way radio repair. There were also some TVs that were new that were for sale. The shop also sold new Quasar TVs. There was also a good selection of parts for servicing including caddies full of vacuum tubes. 

I do remember the first couple of in home repairs. I really was nervous, as I tested all the tubes then after getting the TV working, making all the needed adjustments. After a few weeks, I felt confident in my ability to service the sets. Probably 90% of the repairs were simple in home repairs, the remaining 10% needed to come into the shop. I learned a lot the hard way on those in that 10%. Some of those took a lot of time to repair, but I learned a lot by getting them repaired and back to the customer. 

One customer I had was an old retired logger. It seems he was always broke until his wife died. The story was that when she died in her sleep, he yelled at her in the bed for a few days until they came and took her away. After that, while cleaning out her things, he started finding cash hidden all over the house. He found thousands in cash that she had hidden away from him over the years. One of the things he did with his new found wealth was to come in and buy one of my Quasar TVs. He ordered a new top of the line model with remote control. Remote control was an option then and not something you often saw.

 After a couple of weeks with his new TV, he came in complaining that his TV would do weird things around 12:15 in the morning, mostly turning off or changing channels. I went over to his house and changed the remote processing board under warranty. He still had the problem. I got him a new remote, still had the problem. When he decided he wanted his money back if I couldn’t fix it, I decided I wanted to see the problem first hand. I went over to his house about 11:30 and watched TV with him. About 12:15, a guy I knew, who had just gotten off work at a lumber mill down the road, and got off every evening at midnight, came around the corner by my customer’s house. When he accelerated out of the corner in his Camaro, he would floor it. Since his Camaro didn’t have an air cleaner on it, the sound of the air sucking through the carburetor made a high pitched sound. Now, back in those days, remote controls worked by generating a very high pitched audio sound to operate the needed functions. I explained to my customer that the sound of the Camaro accelerating was what was disturbing his TV. His fix he came up with for that problem was to get his shotgun and wait until the guy came by the next night. Before that happened, I talked my friend into putting the air cleaner back on his car unless he wanted to chance getting shot. That took care of that problem. 

After about a year or so there, my then wife got tired of living in such a remote area, so I sold the name and the two way radio equipment to a guy in the town who wanted to repair radios and we packed up and moved back to Bellingham. In the year we were there, we had made enough to live on, buy a new car and to pay off my father in law for the shop loan.

When we moved back to Bellingham I had two things. A fully equipped repair shop, just short a building, and a year’s real experience in the repair business. My thought was to open a repair shop north of Bellingham in the Laurel area called Meridian Electronics. I rented a tiny building and did just that. Hindsight being what it is, trying to start a shop from scratch in an area that already had sufficient number of shops, was not a real good idea. It didn’t go well and after a few short months, I realized I needed to do something different. The first thig I thought about was going to work at one of the local shops. 

There was a shop in Fairhaven called A-total Electronics Service. It was in the basement of an old building in the old part of town. They were advertising for a technician. I made an appointment to go in and check it out. When I got there, there were about ten or so techs, all very entry level, wearing rubber boots and standing in about 6 or 8 inches of water trying to fix TVs. I decided that wasn’t the place for me. I decided to see what else I might find. 

A couple of days later, I was driving through Ferndale, and saw a sign on Main St. for Robinson TV and Appliance. I knew they had a repair shop, and so I decided to stop in and see if they might be hiring. I spoke to the owner, Pete Horrigal, who told me he didn’t actually own the repair shop, he just rented the area out to a guy who ran it as a separate business. It just so happened that the guy who had been running the shop had, about a month ago, just picked up most of his things and moved to Arizona. If I wanted to take over, I could just have all the parts stock and equipment he had left there. I moved in the next day. We were at that location for about six months before we moved to a new location a few blocks away. At the new location, I had a much better shop space. The good part of running my shop out of this TV and appliance sales store was that his customers came in automatically when they may have had a problem. The owner was a really friendly guy who was well known in the community, and so when people had a problem, they came there to get it resolved. That was the good part. The bad part was that he was a horrible business man. Lucky for him, he was also a profitable commercial fisherman. He would lose money with the store all winter, and then replenish his funds by fishing all summer. The effect that his bad business sense had on me, was that when I was out on service calls, a customer would come in to pick up their equipment that I had repaired. Even though I had a strict cash only policy, He would let anybody just take their equipment and leave. He would tell them to just pay when they could. He did the same thing with his TV and appliance sales. Pretty soon, we both had way too much on the books. I would talk to him about it, he would temporarily stop, but within a few days he was back at it again. In the fall of 1978, I had had enough. I left and decided to do something else completely different.

In the fall of 1978, I went to work at Bellingham Motors selling cars. I actually still had my repair shop and still serviced items for a few good repair customers that I maintained by working out of my house, but my main job was selling cars. Bellingham Motors was a Pontiac, Buick and Mazda dealership. Back then, Mazda didn’t make much anybody really wanted, mostly rotary powered models that were not real popular. The only exception was the brand new RX-7, but all you could do then was to take orders and deposits on those. The Pontiacs and Buicks of the day were also a hard sell. 

I tried as hard as I could to sell new cars without much luck. I really wanted to sell used cars. They had a used car lot about two blocks away. One of the owner’s kids ran it and sales there were real slow. In the first month, I only sold one new car. It was a 1978 Buick Special. It was to an older couple. We didn’t have the car they wanted in stock, so I had to find one at another dealer and do a dealer trade. I found the car they wanted at a dealer in Beaverton Oregon. I hired a guy to take a bus down to Beaverton to drive it home. The morning he was to go, I showed up early at the dealership. My driver was a no-show. That meant I had to catch an early bus to Beaverton, just south of Portland. I got to Royal Moore Buick about 4:00 in the afternoon and picked up the new Buick. It had, I believe 11 miles on it. I headed out in the new car and after only a couple of miles it overheated. I pulled into a service station and filled it with water and headed out again. This time I got about ten more miles when it just ran out of power. I coasted off the freeway and into the driveway of a house in a really rural area. I went to the door, and asked if I could use the phone. I called Royal Moore Buick, and talked to someone in their service department. While I was having this conversation, the homeowner said my car was steaming really badly. I told the guy to hold on and went out to check it out. The car wasn’t steaming, it was on fire! I went back in and told the guy on the phone I would have to call him back. I had to call the fire department. I hung up and called the fire department. They showed up, but the car was a total loss. I then tried to call back to the dealership. They had all gone home. I ended up calling Royal Moore, the owner of the dealership, at home. He sent out a tow truck, towed the car back to the dealership, then the tow truck driver took me to the Greyhound station. I took an overnight bus home and got home about 6:00 in the morning. The next day I had to explain the story to the couple who had ordered the car. They bought a somewhat similar car off the lot. I think they felt sorry for me.

 It was about this time that they decided to let me run the used car lot. I was in my element there. The first month sales at the used car lot quadrupled. The problem I had then was that when the new car lot took in any kind of a muscle car. They didn’t want them on the lot, so they would sell them to me for what they gave the customer in trade, sometimes even less. I ended up broke, but with a bunch of really cool cars at home. I eventually sold them and made good money on them, but I didn’t really want to.

 I also learned to repair and recover pool tables, as one of the car lot owners, Chuck Hurlbut, had a pool table sales business at the same location, calledd K&H Recreation that shared the building with the used car lot. His son in law, Scott Richardson, who I knew from school, he was a year ahead of me, taught me how to install and cover pool tables. We had a great time and got to be good friends. I continued to offer that service for over forty years. Chuck’s father, Chuck senior, worked at K&H most of the time. He was a great guy, and had been in the car business for many years. He told me he went to work at the local Ford dealership when the Model A came out because he thought it was the best car he had ever seen. That would have been in 1929. I loved the stories he would tell about his experiences in the car business.

One of the other owners, Arne Hanna, ran the Budget rent a car office they owned that was also in the used car building. I seemed to be the guy who helped out there when he was gone out of the office. When Arne had to have open heart surgery, I filled in, running the Budget office for a couple of months while he was gone. In the summer of 1979, I decided that as fun as it was working at the car dealership, I really needed to go back to what I was trained to do. I needed to find a job in the electronics repair field.

Back in those days, most every town had at least one TV repair shop. In a town the size of Bellingham, there were probably about six or so. These ranged from small one man operations to large companies with lots of techs. In the Bellingham area that included Whatcom County, there were about three of those bigger shops. Where the smaller shops did warranty repairs for brands they may have sold, the big shops did warranty repairs for most major brands. I decided I wanted to go to work for one of those bigger shops. 

It was an interesting time in the TV repair business. When I started to repair sets in 1974, most all the sets I would repair were of the tube type design that had been used from the first days of the TV industry. What was just starting out at the time were solid state sets. When these first came to the market, they were both expensive and difficult to repair. The average service tech had little or no experience or training on solid state components. The new sets were, like the tube sets, all discrete components, so virtually any repairs had to go into the shop. It wasn’t like the tube sets though, where you tested the tubes, then if the problems persisted, you would take the set in. At the time, you couldn’t just take out the transistors and test them. Some sets did have plug in transistors, but that really didn’t solve anything. If a transistor failed, it would usually take other components with it. 

It seemed that all the major manufacturers came out with solid state TVs at about the same time. The original discrete designs only lasted for a year or so. I think the manufacturers realized that the service of these just wasn’t realistic at that time. So, the response was modular TVs. These sets were still expensive, but they contained anywhere from a couple of in home replaceable modules, to many modules, one for each circuit in the set. This made the solid state sets much more home serviceable. The tech just replaced his tube caddy with a module caddy. Of course, you had to have one for each brand of television you serviced. This allowed the tech to either go back to the shop after the repair and repair the module, or just send it back to the manufacturer in exchange for a rebuilt one. That all sounded good, but it did bring about other problems. It got so that one of the first things you would look for was the inherent bad connections where the modules attached to the main chassis, but all in all, it helped make the solid state TVs make the transition. That left the only problem with the transition being the cost of the sets. To reduce the cost of the sets. Many manufacturers brought out hybrid sets, these would use vacuum tubes for the main output circuits, reducing the cost of the set. These sets lasted a few years, then everything went to solid state. The prices also eventually went down.

The exception to all this was the Japanese manufacturers. They were the first to offer solid state TVs, they were always discrete and they never offered any hybrid models. They were also usually only small, portable sets. Because of this, the sets they made were very unpopular with most service techs. They were also not so popular with customers at the time, so you seldom ever saw one for service. That meant most techs never got too familiar with them. The really unpopular one at that time was the Sony. Their design of their circuits was totally different than what was the norm at the time. Ten years later, all sets were designed similar to what Sony was doing. I remember the first Sony color TV I had in for service. It was totally foreign to me. In the future, the Sony TVs became my favorites for service. 

As I went looking for a job back in the electronics repair industry, I was a little concerned. I had only worked on electronics for myself and had quit school when I purchased my first repair shop, so I had not graduated from either electronics school I attended. If I went to work for one of those shops, and started to work with other techs, would my lack of ability suddenly become apparent? 

Of the bigger shops in the area, the pinnacle of the shops was a company called Wiztronics. It was in a new building in an industrial complex. They did warranty repairs for pretty much every company. Besides servicing TVs, they serviced audio, commercial audio and two way radio, including vehicle installation. In fact, they owned two way radio repeater sites all over the northwest. I thought applying there was well beyond my scope. There was another shop in Lynden called Lloyds of Lynden (pun intended I’m sure). They were a much smaller shop and did mostly TV repair. So, one day, I decided to head north to Lynden. I had heard that Lloyds might be looking for a tech. As I was driving north toward Lynden, I saw Wiztronics over to my left. I decided, what the heck, I’ll go in and talk to them. I had never been in the place before. I walked in the front door. There was a huge showroom filled with every kind of new high tech equipment that was available at that time. They sold Sylvania and Sony products, and had most everything in stock. I was duly impressed. I walked up to the receptionist and asked who I might talk to about a job. She said she would get one of the owners to come and talk to me. A few moments later, Jon Wiswell came out to speak to me. We proceeded to go to his large office where he interviewed me. Come to find out, their TV tech had just given his notice as he was moving out of state. I was then given a tour of the shop area. Going through the showroom, then through the lunchroom, we went down a few stairs into a large warehouse area with a long room along one side. That was the shop area. The first area in the shop we came to was what they referred to as the TV bench. There was a well-equipped bench, then a test area where about a dozen TVs could be tested after they were repaired. There was also a shelf area where TVs waiting for parts were stored. Much different than what I had ever seen before. The next area was the E bench, E standing for entertainment. That was where Stereo items were worked on, audio amps, turntables and such. Again, there was a well-equipped bench and shelves for items waiting for parts. There was next an area that held about fifty file cabinets with service manuals. After that was what they called the Tape bench. That was where tape equipment, both consumer and professional, were serviced as well as car audio. The final area was the two way area. That included a service bench and a screen room. Outside in the warehouse was further storage and an area for radio installation. They could pull a full sized cement truck inside to work on it. I was really impressed. I was also surprised when they offered me a job as their TV repair tech on the spot. I started a few days later.

When I started at Wiztronics, I only had a couple of days to work with the outgoing tech before he left. When I got there, there was about a two week waiting time before a customer’s TV would be looked at. In the first couple of months there, they sent me to a few TV schools that were put on by the manufacturers. That was a help, and within about two months or so, I had the TV repair department caught up enough that we could look at any TV that came in for service the next day. The owners were happy to see that and started to give me a few other things to do around the shop. They also gave me a raise. It was about that time that the E bench tech decided to move away. The owners asked if since I was getting caught up with the TV bench repairs, would I be willing to also take on doing the E bench repairs for even more money. I, of course said yes. 

One thing that I was not familiar with that had recently come to the E bench was repair of VCRs. Mostly all we saw then were commercial units that were somewhat simple, reel to reel black and white units from schools and commercial ¾ inch U-matic units, but the VHS and Betamax units were starting to sell. We were even starting to sell them there. They offered to send me to multiple schools to learn from the manufactures how to repair both Beta and VHS VCRs. These were some very intense schools covering some very new technology.

At that time, I became one of only a handful of techs in the northwest that had actual training in how to service these units. That was followed up with a training session on Laser Disc player repair, all these schools were from a week to two weeks each and I went to, I believe, about six of them. As this part of the business got to be busy, I helped them find a replacement TV tech for me to train, and I went full time into video recorder and black and white video camera repair. 

The technology of the VCR was something brand new at that time, and quite complicated. It was a marriage of electronics and mechanics. The operation of control servos were at that time, brand new. The early VCRs were also very expensive, and the servo and control circuits were very complex. Ten years later, VCRs became much less complicated and much cheaper. But, at this early time, these ran from $1200 to $2000, and that was in 1979 money. It was a luxury item, and the repairs had to be performed by trained personnel. Sometime later, it seemed like every shop would work on them. I remember in the somewhat early days of the VCR, a friend of mine had a TV repair shop in Ferndale. One day, he called me and asked me what I preferred to use to clean video heads. I told him, then, since I would be in the area the next day, I told him I would stop by and show him just what I liked to use. I showed up at his shop the next day. He had a VCR on his workbench with the top cover off. I handed him the materials I used to clean heads and asked him to tell me what he thought. He looked at me sheepishly, and asked “where are the heads in this”. Boy did I get concerned, as the video heads were made of thin glass and easily broken. I proceeded to show him how to clean the heads.

Likewise, another technology that arrived at a similar time was the Laser Disc. When it came out in the late 70s, the idea of having a product that used a laser was almost unfathomable. When the first models came on the market from Pioneer and Magnavox, they actually used tube lasers. These were actually dangerous to work around. The second generation used LED lasers, and were a lot less dangerous. Doing the needed alignment on the original Laser Disc machines could have been one of the most complex and difficult procedures I ever had to do. This also was the case with the early CD players. After a few years, both the Laser Disc and the CD players incorporated it all into one chip. After that, they were much easier to work on.

About a year after I came to work at Wistronics, Jon Wiswell was ousted by his other partners, so I then started working closely with one of the other owners, Jerry Noe. Today, Wiztronics is still around, although they have only worked on two way radios for many years. Jerry and I are still friends to this day

In the same complex behind where I worked, was a large company called Allsop Automatic. In the early 1970s they had invented a product called the “Boot-In”. It was a plastic, spring loaded unit for the storage and transport of ski boots. Back then, ski boots had leather soles, and had to be stored in a device that would hold them flat. This product was a sensation with skiers, so Allsop bought a big building and the injection molding equipment to manufacture these products. When demand finally caught up, they were looking for something else to make with their molding equipment.

Their second big popular product was an audio cassette head cleaner. They bought the patent from a Canadian who had invented it, and started making them. It was an ingenious product and was even more popular than their Boot-In. As VHS and Beta became more popular, and with Allsop’s reputation for their cassette head cleaners, Allsop felt the need to develop a head cleaner for home video products. They came over to Wiztronics and asked me if I would be willing to come work for them part time as a design consultant. I did, and was involved in the development and testing of both their VHS and Beta head cleaners for about two years.

One day, while I was working at Wiztronics in the Summer of 1981, a guy came in looking for the video tech he had heard about that worked there. They called me up from the shop. The guy introduced himself as Eric Caffe, the new owner of a small video rental shop located inside the local Budget Tapes and Records location in downtown Bellingham. His business was called the Video Department. We soon became friends and I helped him with things in his store. He would allow me to get movies to watch before they were released. It was a good thing for both of us.

 The Video Department was a small business and I’m sure that Eric never made a lot of money there. One day in the fall of 1981 I guess he was working in his store and grumbling about how slow business was, when a guy who was traveling through the area stopped in to rent a VCR and some movies. Evidently, he overheard Eric complaining about business and asked him a question. Are you a betting man? Eric said he might be. The guy, Jeff Arlyn, from New York, said he wanted to make Eric a wager. He would come to work for him for free for a month. If after that month, they weren’t making a lot more money than he was, he would leave, hopefully leaving Eric with some good ideas. If he was making real good money at the end of the month, Jeff would own one half of the business. Eric agreed. It was succesful, Jeff had some great ideas on how to promote the business and by the end on the year, it was re-named the Video Depot, and moved into a large building a block away. With this new expansion, one thing they wanted to offer was a service department. They made me a great offer and on January first of 1982, I started up the Video Depot Service Department.

In 1983, Jeff Arlyn bought out Eric Caffe, and he retired at about 36 years old. To say that Jeff Arlyn was a promoter would be an understatement. By the end of that year the Video Depot had 11,000 titles of movies in their store for rent. That was in 1983. They also had a large sales department, the service department and a number of franchise locations around the area. The business covered half of a city block on Railroad Avenue. 

I remember one time when the sales guys were sitting in their offices complaining how slow sales were. Jeff came into the office. He offered to bet the sales guys $100 that the next guy who came in the door, for whatever reason, he could sell him something that was in stock for full price, not only that, but for another $100 they could go out and pick the item in the showroom he was to sell. They took him up on that and told him he had to sell the last Betamax unit we had in stock. We had quit selling them and no longer rented Beta tapes. He agreed. A few minutes later, a guy came in to get change for a parking meter. About ten minutes later he walked out with the Beta VCR under his arm. When he said he wanted to see about renting a movie to watch with his new purchase, Jeff sent him to the only video store that rented Beta tapes. He won his $200. 

Part of how the Video Depot became so successful was because of their rental program. All movies were $1 a day, but you originally had to buy a membership for $100. After the first year, you still had to buy the membership for $100, but you could only buy one if you bought a VCR from them. That brought in a huge amount of capital, as pretty much everybody in the area wanted to have a membership. 

In 1984, the most popular Christmas gift was the Cabbage Patch doll. You absolutely couldn’t find one to save your life. Three days before Christmas, Jeff managed to get a truckload of the dolls. We had a one day sale, buy a VCR and a membership and get a free Cabbage Patch doll. When we opened up that Saturday, it was like what they show on TV and movies. There were hundreds of people from all over the state and Canada outside the doors trying to push their way in the door. We sold out in a day. 

On another occasion, when camcorders first came out, they were a hot item. Every store was selling them for around $1500, and they cost $1150. Jeff ran ads in all the papers that we were selling them for $1100. The sales guys wanted to know if he was nuts. His strategy was that every customer who bought a camcorder also bought at least $500 worth of accessories. These items were marked up way more the camcorder. The carrying case sold for $60 and cost us $3, the lens filter kits were about the same. It was similar for all the other accessories. They made more money than ever selling those camcorders for less than cost. Evidently the cost of the camcorder was all anybody cared about. I have always remembered that. So, when I buy a new cell phone or something like that, I don’t buy the accessories there. That’s where the money is made. Jeff was great as a promoter, but had issues with his personal life. When I worked there, he was 34 years old, but had been married nine times, twice during the short time I worked there. I have no idea how much he paid out to support all his ex-wives, but it was his eventual unraveling.

One thing that I found when I worked at the Video Depot was a number of customers would come in looking to have old home movies transferred to video cassette. The first couple of times, I borrowed a projector and did the transfers with what I had available. Soon, the need started to get really busy. They even let me put up a sign offering the service at the rental counter. It was a side thing that I did in the evenings at home. I ended up picking up a Telecine and a bunch of projectors. Some of the people who came in to get things transferred would either sell me their projectors or trade me for the transfers. I ended up with two good Ektragraphic slide projectors, an 8 mm movie projector, a super 8 movie projector, a super 8 with sound projector and a 16 mm projector. I also had the ability to transfer to VHS, Beta and U-matic. I also offered the service of changing from one format to another and video editing. On some transfers, I would add a soundtrack. That was most common on the slide transfers. I offered the transfer service for about three years.

The service department also had increased in size. Like when I worked at Wiztronics, I attended a number of schools to stay up with all the new products. I went to schools to learn how to repair cameras, camcorders, CD players, phone equipment and any new products that were coming to market. In fact, in the spring of 1986 I spent almost half my time getting training on new products in California. 

One of the classes I attended was on video camera repair. This was at the time when the manufactures were still using tube cameras, Vidicon and Newvicon image tubes were the most common. The alignment of those tubes were about as difficult as aligning an early Laser Disc. It was not uncommon to spend days getting the alignment correct on these using a Light Box, a waveform monitor and a vectorscope. All very expensive pieces of test equipment. Like most other products, the tube camera was soon replaced by CCD chip cameras. Easy to align by comparison.

 In the summer of 1984, I tried to get Jeff to sell me the service department. He decided he wanted to maintain control of the service department, but did agree to give me a good deal on one of the franchise locations. I then purchased the Video Depot location in the small farming community of Everson. 

I still worked full time running the service department of the main store. In 1986 I hired a second tech to keep up with the workload. He was a guy who was my lab partner at a Panasonic camera school in California earlier that year. At that time, we had three of us in the repair department, myself, the new tech and a secretary who took care of paperwork and billing. 

Over in the main office, there started to be a problem among the managers. Katy was the third employee of the Video Depot in the early days as the bookkeeper. By 1985 she was the store manager. Then, in 1986, Jeff had hired one of his friends from New York, Paul Lipton, to come to work at the store. Katy managed the rental department and anything to do with that, Paul managed the sales and warehouse and anything pertaining to that. That left the service department in limbo. Both Katy and Paul wanted to lay claim to control of it. One day in June of 1986, Katy came into the shop and handed me and my other tech day planner books. She said she had decided that she was in charge of the service department and her first requirement was to improve time management. We were to stop work every fifteen minutes each day and write down in the books exactly what we had done for the previous fifteen minutes. I told her that this was ridicules, and I would not participate in this. Her response was that I knew where the door was, and if I didn’t want to comply, I should leave. I did. My new tech wrote down in his book what he had done for the last fifteen minutes. 

The next day, I returned to pick up my personal things, and while I was there, I was called into Paul Liptons office. When all this was going down, Jeff Arlyn was gone out of the country. Paul told me that he was in charge of the service department and that I couldn’t quit. I responded that I was not under any contract and could leave whenever I wanted. He said that since they had spent so much on my training, I couldn’t leave. Well, I left.

 Later that day, I received a call from Jeff. He had heard that I was quitting. He offered that from that point on, the service department would only answer to him and I would be completely in charge of that department. I was already mad about the whole thing. So I told him I was leaving. He wasn’t to upset and said he understood. I put my house up for sale, rented a truck and moved to northern California. I am still friends with Eric Caffe, Jeff Arlyn was found dead in Reno some years later after the demise of the Video Depot.

Over the years, I had become good friends with some of the factory service reps, especially the Panasonic rep named Ted Castillo. When I told him I was relocating to northern California, he was happy to give me some recommendations of places were he was satisfied with their operations. He recommended two places, one just west of San Jose in Campbell, and another one just south of San Francisco. 

Monday morning after I got to California, I decided to go and check out the one in Campbell since it was much closer to where I was living. Evidently, Ted had called them and told them I would be coming in. They wouldn’t allow me to leave without agreeing to go to work there at Westgate TV stereo service. I never did get to the other company. 

This company was run by a Cliff Hansen. He was the CET (Certified Electronics Technician) testing coordinator for northern California and had a good reputation and was someone who worked closely with the BEAR (Bureau of Electronics and Appliance Repair) a California governmental group that regulated how those companies did business. He was anxious to expand into more video service. Up until that time his focus was on TV and audio repair. The company had vans that went to local retailers and picked up units that were under warranty for service. For this company, warranty repairs were a focus. 

When I moved to California, we had contacted my wife’s sister, who was a property manager, and she found us an apartment in Mountain View. The minute we arrived at the apartment, we gave notice that we would be moving out by the end of the month. We found a much nicer place in Sunnyvale, and moved in at the end of the month. 

I seemed to fit in well working at the shop and I became friends with the owner. After about three months there, I decided to go visit my brother one weekend. Since the time he lived in Santa Cruz, my brother had moved all over California and finally settled in Carmel. I took a long weekend and drove to Carmel to visit him while my wife (number two) was out of town. 

I had just recently rented the nice three bedroom apartment in Sunnyvale for $1350 a month. I happened to look at the local paper while in Carmel, and found a large three bedroom house overlooking the Pacific Ocean and a state park, right off the Pacific coast highway for rent for $1300. I decided that was the place for us. I asked my brother where he would go to get electronics repaired in the area. He said the place he was familiar with was an electronics retailer that also did service called Dores in Monterey. I went to Dores and told them I was looking for a job in that area. They had me talk to the service manager. It was the same guy who, years before, I had shown how to clean heads on the VCR. He asked me when I could start. 

I went back to work, and tried to work up the nerve to give Cliff my notice. That Thursday, I asked Cliff to go to lunch. At lunch, I told him that I really didn’t like living in a big city or living in an apartment. I also told him I had found a house to rent in Carmel and a job in Monterey. His response was for me to go home after lunch and take a long weekend, with pay. On Monday, we would again go to lunch. I was at that time to come up with a plan that would allow me to continue to work there. I did as he asked. Over the weekend, I came up with two possibilities. One was that he could buy me a new vehicle and pay for my travel expenses to travel the 77 miles each way back and forth to work. The second thought was that he could pay me for 40 hours a week, but I would only work Monday through Thursday, 8 hours a day. That Monday we met and he asked me what ideas I had come up with. I told him about the two options I had come up with. His response was yes. I asked him which one he liked. He gave me both. He went to a local dealer that afternoon and bought me a new Ford Aerostar cargo van, gave me a gas card and set my schedule as I wanted. He went even further than that. He said he would, in the future open up a branch location in the Monterey area and let me run that.

 Things were looking up. After that, he and I, along with the service manager met a number of times to talk about the new location and how that was to work. About a year later, the service manager quit and opened a shop in Monterey himself. Of course this was upsetting to both Cliff and I. One thing that transpired from that, was the end of my four day work weeks, as I was made the service manager. The good part was a large raise. 

It was during that time also that I got involved with the local Carmel Highlands Fire Department. The first morning after moving to Carmel, I woke up in the morning to the sound of helicopters. I looked out the back sliding glass door off the bedroom, the top of the hill behind the house was on fire. I looked out the front windows toward the ocean. I watched as the helicopter scooped water out of the ocean and proceeded to pour it on the fire. The next weekend, I signed up to join the fire department as a volunteer. I got really involved with the fire department. At the Carmel Highlands Fire Department, there were five full time employees. The chief, a secretary, one guy that was a training officer, one guy that was the equipment maintenance guy, and the other guy was the building guy. The three guys worked rotating 24 hour shifts so that there was always someone on duty. Living next door, I became good friends with them all. I learned how to do EMS, and became an engineer. That allowed me to drive the apparatus and to operate the pumps on the fire engines. Since I lived right next door, I was able to get up and get out to the engine before the firefighters on duty in the station were able to get there. I also served as president of the volunteers. The two things I liked the most was driving the engines code 3 to a call, or being first in on the hose line on a fire. Both of those were a real adrenaline rush.

Plans continued for Westgate’s second location, and in 1988 we opened Westgate TV Stereo Service of Monterey County. The difficulty with this was that he really wanted me in the main location, and I, of course wanted to be in the new location. This began to cause some friction. After a few months, I was anxious to be out from under his control and just working at the new location. The previous service manager’s shop in Monterey had, by this time, gone out of business, and was getting investigated by the BEAR. 

At my new house in Carmel, my only next door neighbor was the Carmel Highlands Fire Department. One of the three full time fire fighters, Goudenz Panholzer, was looking for an investment opportunity along with his father. I had kept my friends in the department filled in on what was going on with Westgate, and he and his father, who was an electronics engineering professor at the local college, were interested in buying out Cliff, so the three of us would own the shop in Monterey. We went and met with Cliff. He offered to sell the business, along with all the equipment, for $60,000. He would also agree to process our warranty claims for a small percentage until we acquired our own accounts. Since we did so much warranty service, this was really important. The partners, Goudenz and his father, (I can’t remember his name) agreed. The deal was that Goudenz would pay $20,000 for one third while his father would pay the other $40,000. At any time, I could buy out my third by agreeing to take on $20,000 as a loan from the father at no interest. To start out, I offered to be just the manager and work for a wage. Someday in the future I might take him up on his offer. 

We changed the name of the company to Protronics, and went to work. We were really busy and set up a route similar to the ones Westgate had to pick up products from stores for warranty repairs. We were processing lots of warranties and sending the paperwork in to Westgate for processing. In the first ninety days of operation we processed close to $40,000 in warranty claims for parts and labor. After ninety days, we hadn’t received any money back from Westgate for our claims. We went and met with Cliff about this and found out a few things. Number one, he never had any intention in paying us for the warranty claims, he just kept the money. Number two, I had also been trying to get him to return about twenty or so of my school training certificates that he had framed and hung on the wall of the main shop. I told him I wanted them right then. When I looked, he had removed my name off all of them and had his name put on them. As luck would have it, I did have copies of the certificates but, I’ve always wished I had the originals. 

We got an attorney and explained what had happened. He stated that because processing warranties that were not really yours was illegal, we had no leg to stand on. We had to change our policy on warranty repairs until we made our own accounts. That was a no brainer, but the real problem was that the $40,000 we needed to front the repairs had come from the father who was a silent investor. That cash flow was cut off right there. 

We had hired a tech who was in the military at Fort Ord. He wasn’t really much of a tech, so we had him run service calls and pick-up and delivery work. But he seemed to really enjoy the work and was just getting out of the Army with a medical discharge. He had been with us for only a couple of months, when Goudenz came in one day. The Army guy (I can’t remember his name) asked about buying an interest in the shop. The father offered to sell him his two thirds of the company. He would even hold a contract at low interest with the first payment due in six months. They both agreed. The Army guy got his wife to come in and do the books and paperwork as well as his son, who was just out of high school and his son’s best friend to came in to do running around work. He did work hard to make a go of the place, but in six months, the day before the first payment to the father was due, he and his family just disappeared. We were back to square one, paychecks bounced as they had cleaned out the accounts and we further found out that they hadn’t paid any of the taxes. When they all left, we downsized as much as we could. It was just me as a tech, and a guy named Larry King who did the counter work and running around. My wife did the books as well as she could. 

The next surprise was when Goudenz somehow sold his $20,000 share to Larry King. Larry took out a second mortgage on his house to raise the money. Within a few short months, it became apparent that there was no coming out of this because of the un-paid taxes, and in August of 1989, I left the shop with Larry, as he always thought he could save it. He went on for a few months then closed the doors. In that July, my wife and I split up. I moved to Mountain View and went to work for a company that mostly did factory refurbishing of products for RCA and GE. By that time, I was sick of California and crazy home prices. When Labor Day weekend came around, I decided to go visit my sister in law in Salt Lake City, I had never been there before.

When I was in Salt Lake City, I found real estate was really affordable and I got a job offer. Two weeks later, I was living in Sandy Utah, just south of Salt Lake. I got a job with a company there called Service West. The owner, Randy Whitehead had bought the company from someone and really knew nothing about the service business. The techs he inherited with the business were rough ridding all over him. I found it nearly impossible to work there. I tried to implement improvements for the owner to get things back on track, but got nowhere with the techs there. I also, during that time, worked part time at two other locations in Salt Lake. I went to work part time at a company called A&E automotive. He hired me to work on electrical problems on cars. I worked there for a month or so. I really liked the fact that I got to know a few of the mechanics there. They helped me with doing things on my cars that I didn’t have the tools to do. The other job I had was filling in at a friend’s car stereo store called AV Specialists (I’m sure they were working on copying another business, TV Specialists, with a good reputation), installing car audio and alarms. I just worked there a few nights a week and on Saturday. Until about two weeks before Christmas. At that time, the two main full time installers got mad at the owner and quit and moved to Idaho. That made me the only installer during the busiest time of the year. I worked as much as I could until after the first of the New Year. I then focused on my other job at Service West. But late in the spring, I’d had enough of Service West, and decided to look for another job. 

Similar to Wiztronics in Bellingham, the panicle repair shop in the Salt Lake area was TV Specialists, (the name they were copying). They repaired pretty much everything, including consumer and professional video equipment. They were looking for a video tech when I applied to work there. When I got there, they had six techs working on video equipment. The head guy in the department was Emory Berry, he was both a tech and the shop manager. Looking back, he could be the best tech I ever had the opportunity to work with. He not only worked on consumer video like VHS and Beta but was trained to work on professional broadcast video like M2 and Betacam. I ended getting a bench right across from him. We got to be the best of friends. 

When I started there, there was about a month backlog to get video equipment looked at. Customers would come in, pay for an hours labor, (at that time $65), then wait about a month to get their equipment looked at. Even with six techs. Emory and I got to be real competitive in repairs. 

In the shop, similar to auto shops, there was a book that would tell you how much time to charge out for each repair. The actual goal was to be able to charge out eight hours in labor each day. If you were good at it, you could charge more than eight hours per day. Emory and my goal was to charge out twenty four hours of labor per day. Within six months we were servicing almost twice as many pieces per month as when I got there, and there was no wait time, things got looked at the next day. All this with just the two of us. The only other guy in the video department was just a guy who did the simplest of repairs, cleaned heads, replaced rubber parts, etc. The money was great, as they paid based on production. 

While there, I was contacted by VICA, it was an organization that held a yearly competition for technical school students. They held competitions for automotive related students as well as welding students and electronics students. I was asked to do the testing for the electronics students for the State of Utah. I was tasked with both writing a written test and putting real life problems into actual TVs, VCRs and cameras for the students to troubleshoot. After that, I was contacted by the Salt Lake Community College. They asked me to give a class in electronics troubleshooting. The next year, two of my students went to the national VICA competition. One took first in the nation the other took third. 

Also when in Salt Lake, I started doing a once monthly call in radio show answering consumer’s electronics questions. I was told, it was to an audience of about 60,000 listeners. It was a fun time in my career. But, my then new wife and I decided we wanted to move to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island in Washington. So in September of 1996, we packed up and moved there. To this day, when I am in Salt Lake City, I still stop into TV Specialists, although, there are no longer many people there that I know anymore.

When we were still living in Utah, we started to make plans for moving to Friday Harbor and starting an electronics repair shop. I started to put together the needed tools and equipment that would be required. I also tried to think of a good name for a shop there. The name I came up with was “Inter Island Electronics”. I had a friend make up a logo for it. I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that name wasn’t being used already. I picked up a San Juan County phonebook, and looked for anything with a name like that. I found that there was an Inter Island Electric. I figured it would be a good gesture to call them and see if they were OK with us using that name. The owner, Lou Dickenson, said he had no problem with that, then asked where we were going to be located. I told him that I hadn’t actually looked for a location yet. He told me he was just finishing a small industrial complex in town, and he would like to have me as a tenant. I said that sounded good to me, and signed up for one of his offices. It was to be completed by the time we got there. 

We arrived on the first of October in 1996. We were somewhat busy right away. Besides performing repairs, we also sold and installed satellite dishes for ourselves and the other satellite dealers on the island, as well as selling TVs and other audio and video equipment. We also did some whole home audio systems and home theater installations. 

Lou owned the small industrial complex with about six buildings. The small rentals were like mine, about 800 sq. ft.  They went up to about 4000 sq. ft. Where my space was hidden around the back in the basement, there were some prime spots that were right on the Main St. One of the prime tenants was a computer company called Rock Island Computers. They not only did computer sales and repairs, but they were the internet service provider on the island. Of course, at this time, all that was available was dial-up. He was getting a really premium price for his service with very little usage included in the monthly fee. 

Lou offered one free month’s rent with each years lease on his rentals, so not long after we moved in, the computer company agreed to a two year lease. After getting his two free months’ rent, he proceeded buy a building downtown and move out one night with no notice. Of course, this made Lou mad, I think Lou was a handshake kind of guy. I guess he wasn’t able to get any money from the guy. 

One day shortly after that, we were talking after work like we often did. He told me that we should open an internet service provider to compete with Rock Island. I told him that I would look into that. In about a month, Lou and I opened Inter Island Internet. I moved into the prime location vacated by Rock Island, and had a friend from Utah build me an internet server. We advertised dial-up internet for $20 a month with unlimited use. We soon had as many customers as we could handle with our fifty modems. The whole thing made the Rock Island guy really mad. He tried all kinds of things to hurt our system, but between myself and my attorney, we fought him off.

Running an ISP at that time was still a pain, so after a year, we sold off the ISP to another computer company that had opened up, and I bought a house in town with a location for my shop. That was a good fit with my home upstairs and the service shop downstairs. We operated the shop that way until in 2001 when the electronics service business just kind of died. VCRs went away, as did Camcorders. TVs went to flat panels and the price dropped. Suddenly, there was little demand for repairs. The satellite business was still OK, but that didn’t really take up to much of my time. 

I also became friends with the owner of a local used car dealer and car rental company. For about three years, I did all the service and repairs on the rental fleet. Sometimes that would keep me really busy. They had about fifty rental cars. In the spring, I would do the brakes on all the cars. Work there helped to make ends meet.

Similar to when I lived in Carmel, I got involved in the Friday Harbor Fire Department. It was different from Carmel in that we only did structure fires, so no EMS. When I joined the department, I started out like any new volunteer, requiring training. It was an all-volunteer department, so only the chief and a training officer were paid employees. I remember the first fire we had after I had joined. The first volunteers went out with the chief and the training officer on the first out engine. When I got to the station, there were two of us that had just recently joined, and a couple of guys that hadn’t been there too much longer. They needed us and the second out engine at the call, but there was nobody checked out to drive it. The second out engine was a nearly new, very expensive 85ft aerial ladder truck. I got on the radio and asked the chief what I should do. He asked me if I was able to drive it. He knew I had previous experience. I got in with the crew and drove it code 3 up to the fire. Boy was I nervous. But he got me Okayed right away to drive the apparatus. That was always my favorite thing to do in the fire department.

One thing that I learned while living on the island was that there were lots of well to do people who came to visit the island and decided it would be the place to retire. They would build or buy an expensive house, then they would have me come over and install a satellite system and what else they needed. When there, they would tell me how it was where they planned on living out their years and how much they loved the island. Nearly all of them spent about a year there, then moved back to where they came from. I took the right type of person to actually life there for a long time. There were a number of houses that I went to just about once a year as long as I lived there. 

One day, late in 2000, while I was installing a satellite system for a customer that had just purchased a large home on the island. We were talking, and he asked what there was to do on the island in the evening. He had a couple of kids. He was an attorney from southern California. He actually flew to California on Monday morning, then back on Thursday evening. I told him that there wasn’t really much to do and that my wife and I always thought there should be a bowling alley on the island. He thought that was a good idea and told me that if I wanted to pursue opening a bowling alley in Friday Harbor, he would supply any money needed to do it. He gave me his cell number and told me to research it. I said I would. 

While we had our business there, we performed warranty service for most brands of electronic equipment. Some of the major brands like Sony, JVC and Panasonic would contact us and ask us to do remote service calls. They would ask us to do calls on the Olympic Peninsula. They would pay many times the going rate because of the travel required. We would hold off as long as we could on these calls until we had three or four to do, then go off for the weekend and make a fun trip out of it. 

On one of those trips in December of 2000, we went over to the town of Port Townsend to spend the night on our way to points further west. We woke up on Friday morning, and I went over to the local convenience store to get my wife a Dr. Pepper. When there, I noticed that the bowling alley in Port Townsend, Key City Lanes, was closed permanently. As I found out, the owner had sold the building to a large pharmacy, and had to liquidate. I called my attorney friend, and told him about what I had found. We came back the next weekend and met with the owner. After some tough negotiations, we were the owner of most of the equipment needed to open a bowling alley. 

We proceeded to rent a warehouse in Port Townsend and put our new to us equipment into the warehouse. It sat there for almost a year and a half while we tried to find a location for a bowling alley in Friday Harbor. The attorney, had taken out a signature loan for the $40,000 to buy the bowling equipment at the local bank that only required him to pay the interest quarterly. We had been splitting the cost on the warehouse rental for the year and a half. We finally found a building where we could put in the bowling alley, but it would take some serious re-modeling. 

By this time, I found out that the loan the attorney had taken out was a one year loan. By this time, the bank wanted their money, and would not loan him any more money. The owner of the building we were moving into would loan us the money we needed for everything. He would pay off the bank loan and loan us enough to build out the facility as needed, I just had to get rid of the attorney. That was not easy, he really wanted to be involved in the bowling alley project. The bank was going to try to foreclose on his house if he didn’t repay the loan, so eventually he relinquished his interest. He would never talk to me after that and neither he or his kids ever came into the bowling alley. In December of 2002, we opened Paradise lanes. I worked there as the majority owner of the place, and still worked at my repair shop during the day. Running and maintaining a bowling center was a lot of work. I would go in in the morning, do whatever maintenance was required and clean, then work all day during the week at my shop on the projects there, then work from the late afternoon on at the bowling center. We had eight lanes, a good sized pro shop and a large arcade. The restaurant and bar were owned by someone else. 

Before we opened up the center, we found others on the island had had feasibility studies done by both AMF and Brunswick about putting in a center in that small of a town. The studies said it wouldn’t work, and as it was with the high overhead we had, they were probably right. While it was able to stay afloat, it wasn’t the moneymaker we had hoped. 

Sometime early in 2005, we had a falling out with the owner of the building, who was a small part owner of the bowling center. He owed us as a company a fair amount of money from the remodeling. He had refused to pay us back. We decided we would not pay him rent until it was repaid. He then decided we shouldn’t get paid then. We sold him our interest in the place and told him we would stay there working until we sold our house. It sold in two days, in a little over two weeks we were gone off the island. It was a fun experience living there, but we were glad to be back on the mainland. 

During our years on the island, I was able to do service and installation work for a number of famous people, both people from the movie industry and the music industry. It was interesting to meet and get to know these people. It was a great time. 

When I decided to move back to the Bellingham area, I contacted an AV company called Audio Video Excellence. They were interested, but were over manned at the time. They said they would call me when an opening came up.

When we moved back to the mainland, I set up my repair shop at my house and continued to do some repairs. I did, after a month or so, realize that I needed a job. I set off to find something. For the first time in years, electronics repair didn’t seem to be a viable option.

I found a job at a boat building company in La Conner called Nordic Tugs wiring new boats. I had to be at work each day at 7:00AM. At 9:30, a horn would sound and everyone would drop anything they were doing and walk out and take a break for 15 minutes, Noon, same thing, afternoon, again, same thing. I spent all day in the confines of the boats running wiring. I absolutely hated it. After two weeks there, I quit. I really needed to do something else.

The next day, I found an ad for Directv hiring installation techs. With my experience on the island, that would be great. I went to work there and was made a senior tech almost right away. The work was interesting and the pay was great. After a few months, I was made head tech for the area. That paid even more. I even hired my wife to work with me. We went out together. She would do the inside work, while I did the outside work. Between the two us, we were working almost twelve hours a day six days a week, but the money was great.

On a Sunday in the fall of 2006, we had a call to install a new satellite receiver at a customer’s named Darrel Mendelson’s house. When I got there, I realized that the guy was one of the owners of Audio Video Excellence. He also recognized me. He pulled me aside and said that they had been trying to find me to hire me. I had changed my cell number when I went to work for Directv. By that time I was tired of the long hours, so I agreed to go to work for them as soon as my wife found another job. They even found my wife a job to get me to come to work for them.

In November of 2006, I started at AVX. The pay wasn’t great, but I really enjoyed the work. I also got to be good friends with one of the owners named Clark Cyr. I set up my repair shop in an extra office they had and got set up to do warranty repairs for the brands we sold. They really wanted to start doing more work in the San Juan Islands. With my contacts and the friends I had made there, we started to do lots of work there. I was able over the years to get more money and I trained many techs over the years. At one point, not to long before I left there, we counted how many techs had come and gone since I started there. We counted about thirty.

In the spring of 2015, our second journeyman tech quit and moved to California. That left just me working there as a tech. After a while, I was getting tired of not having any help. At that time, I had been working there for more than eight years. One day in April, I was sent out by myself to move a projector in a commercial building in Mt. Vernon. It was not only a two person job, and I had no help, but when I put my head up above the suspended ceiling, the smell was so bad it just about made me sick. After finishing that job, I headed back towards Bellingham. On my way over the freeway, I saw the building of a company that I had always heard of called Dimensional Communications. Since my mood wasn’t good and I was getting sick of AVX, I decided to stop in and see what they might have to offer.

When I walked into Dimensional Communications, it was lunchtime, so not many people were there. They asked me to sit tight and someone would be back from lunch soon. In about ten minutes, Rob Custer came in and interviewed me. I came in under the assumption that they might be looking for an installer. In our conversation, I mentioned my experience as a bench tech. They said that their bench tech who had been there for more than forty years had just retired at the first of the year. That was the position they wanted to fill. They seemed interested, they told me they would let me know in the next couple of days, and sent me on my way. I got about five miles down the road when I got a call. They wanted to hire me. 

The only downside to working there was the commute. I live 45 miles away. I sold the cool car that I had, a 1999 Mustang SVT Cobra Convertible, and bought a more practical (boring) car for commuting. Six months later, I was given a company car. I not only worked in the service department, but they were just starting to get into manufacturing direct view LED screens and the motorized enclosures for them. I got really involved with the LED screens, mostly in the development and design of the control systems and in overseeing the installation. The last thing I picked up as a task has been to do electrical work. In Washington State, you need to be licensed to do AV installation in customers’ homes. To get and maintain the license, requires you to take the same basic education as an electrician. You must also renew the license every three years which requires “continuing education” classes, also the same as an electrician. When the company decided to add a large addition onto the building, I was tasked to wire the entire commercial building. Now, it seems that the maintenance of the building is my responsibility. I don’t mind doing that. 

Working at DCI has been the great end to my electronics career. It has been a great place to work, with many new things to learn. Paul Hagman, the owner has been a great guy to work for. Along with my other duties as listed, I also procured and installed two lanes of bowling at his house.

 My goal is to retire from DCI at the end of 2024. At that time, I will have worked at Dimensional for over nine years, as the longest job position I’ve held, and in the Electronics service field for more than 50 years. But who knows what the future holds?

People you may (or may not)have heard of, that I have either done work for or have had other dealings with over my career. Most of these, I’ve worked with directly, some I’ve become friends with. A few, I’ve only worked at their home, but I never actually met them. In a somewhat chronological order.

Randy Bachman

Clint Eastwood

Steve Miller 

Rick Waite

Alan Silvestri

Nichole Kidman

Sandra Bullock

Jerry Moss

Eileen Brennan

Pat O’Day

Steve Ballmer

Jeff Wright

Robert Pohlad