My working life: Arthur Jacobs on the poetry of appliance repair
Welcome to the second installment in the Long Play series on meaning of work. Meet Arthur Jacobs, former appliance & refrigeration repair company owner who retired in 2019. Now he’s enjoying travel, musical theatre, museums and taking leisurely bike rides around Annex.
—> First installment: Why Work?
I was born in 1947, and had all the formative experiences of a Boomer, including being a corporate dropout at one point. My parents had six kids, I was number four. We lived first in Cleveland, Ohio, where my dad worked for a telephone installation company, and then upstate New York. I was the first of the Jacobs brothers to graduate from university: this was in liberal arts, majoring in physics and mathematics, at SUNY Brockport. One thing I can say about Nelson Rockefeller, the then-governor of NY, was that he found me a place to go to school. As the governor he expanded the SUNY and poured a lot of money into state education. I wasn’t a good student in high school, I was one of “those Jacobs boys” that not much was expected from. I blossomed when I got into university and started to find things I’d like to do. I was good with numbers and quantum mechanics was coming along, solid state physics and geothermal. Things like that interested me. And when I finished, Chrysler offered me an engineering job. I sent out a dozen resumes and they called. They flew me to Detroit from upstate New York and hired me. It was that easy. Up there in Highland Park I wasn’t part of the production, I was in research and development. It was 1969.
Did I enjoy those two years? It was mixed. I was thinking about opening a bicycle shop. When I was a kid we lived north of Syracuse, the farming belt, where the available career paths were few. It was all subsistence jobs.
I was part of the draft for the Vietnam War and while I was at Detroit, I got an occupational deferment. So that was lucky.
At Chrysler, I worked on air conditioning systems for vehicles. Air conditioning was a relatively recent add-on to cars back then. I was part of that development process to incorporate the AC system into the dashboard and look at the climate control in the car. It was one hundred percent male; women were in the secretarial pool. You would also see older women working in the blueprint department with mimeograph machines. Which probably wasn’t good for them, god those fluids didn’t smell healthy.
Detroit wasn’t a great place to live so you lived north of the city. That was the first city I experienced but I hardly went downtown at all. You’d go to a Detroit Pistons game or a Detroit Tigers game, that was about the only reason why you went downtown. Visit Cobo Hall, maybe.
So after about a year and a half, I think I was getting sick of the job, and I meanwhile had met a radical feminist who worked for Burroughs Corporation, which was a computer operator out of Massachusetts. She was a member of a peace collective. By then, you could have called me a hippie. We both were.
Two years after I left, Chrysler went Chapter 11 or bankrupt and they furloughed their entire engineering staff. I would have been out of a job anyway.
And Cathy and I hooked up. I think we were leaning on each other through all these changes. She went off and started working with the Alternative Press Center, which was an indexing organization that provided the Alternative Press Index. That was a paying job and the only money that came in, without which we couldn't survive. We were living on savings.
They were located at a university campus in Minnesota, at Carleton College, where they started. We stayed there for a while, but Nixon was in office and his administration was threatening to cut federal aid to universities if they were offering any kind of assistance or financial aid to radical leftist organizations on campus. So we had to go.
The only place that would take us and offer us free space was Rochdale College in Toronto. I got a high number in the draft lottery in 1971 and I wasn’t going to be drafted. I was free to leave.
(By the way, when I was a student at SUNY I almost got recruited by the Navy. They came upstate and offered free jet flights to New York City for potential recruits to write the Naval Air Exam. I got very excited, it was my first time in NYC, and I was staying on an airfield for free. I passed the written exam but after a night out in NYC I failed the physical test - and was told I was colour-blind to a degree. I would have had a completely different life had I passed.)
Moving from this small town of about 5000 people south of Minneapolis-St. Paul to Toronto was a huge change. And the Alternative Index fell on our shoulders as other volunteers, most of whom were women, left the project in pursuit of paying work. We did OK in Rochdale. We got some new recruits from the US. Yeah, smoked a lot of marijuana. Stayed away from the heavier stuff. We would read the article and index them - it’s an archiving process. We had a lot of library scientists doing this with us too. They still exist, they’re at the University of Maryland right now, the Alternative Press Centre.
We paid rent in Rochdale until there was a rent strike. Then we all stopped paying rent. The space was offered for free. It didn't take much to live on back in the 1970s. We stayed in Rochdale three or four years, until the foreclosure and all that. I liked Rochdale… I mean, there were some people I didn’t like: the biker gangs were a little, you know, on the heavy side, as were the drug dealers. It became a drug den of sorts and its internal security couldn’t do much about it. The place just had to close. And by that time Cathy and I had grown apart, and decided to go our separate ways. From Rochdale I moved into the Annex, which was full of cheap rental options. I needed to decide what I wanted to do with my life.
I met my future wife, Keren, at the Karma Food Co-op. It still exists. We were one of the founding members. She was doing her PhD in Dene languages and I was generally aimless, wondering what to do next. She did her undergraduate at Cornell, and post-grad at U of T, and I found myself dating an Ivy Leaguer. Her first marriage had dissolved too, we were both too young for that first time around, it seems. She travelled to the Northwest Territories a lot and I had a place in the Annex, doing odd jobs, with this gap on my CV just widening. I went back to heat pumps, experimenting with alternative energy and solar. But there was no financial stability in invention and experiment, as scientists will tell you. Some small companies hired me on contract. Keren was the one who got a proper job first, was a TA, researcher, then hired as an adjunct and it went from there.
She moved in with me, which was nice. I guess I was easy to live with. Maybe because I could cook. And she would go back every day, to her apartment on Vaughn Road and do her research. And when I didn't have a place to stay, I would stay on Vaughan Road.
I think she completed her PhD after our second child was born. When did I start Arthur Refrigeration, was it ‘78? Never bothered with apprenticing for someone else, it just didn’t appeal to me. It wasn’t that hard to drum up business because the food co-op recommended me to the co-op housing sector. I did the refrigeration at Karma and did all of their development and installation work there which was a big bonus and that spread my name through the co-ops. I moved into the appliances and that's what kept the telephone ringing. It was a fortunate time because of the co-op boom in the 1980s, I think I serviced at least 50 co-ops and probably over 12,000 appliances over all the years. I grew up with hand-me-downs and repair, so I put that practical knowledge to use. If I wanted something from my older brothers, it was probably broken and I had to fix it to use it. I love fixing broken things.
We bought our house on Olive Avenue in 1980 and we still live there. God, what did we pay back then, $54,000? Trying to remember what the salaries were like… As a junior engineer at Chrysler I was making about $12,000. Teachers were making, like, $6,000. My dad who worked all his life, his salary wasn’t much higher than my junior engineer salary, but he raised his family of six on it.
I had employees in the 2000s. Sam still keeps in touch with me, he works now with Hobart, the commercial foodservice equipment company. He was a service technician. Scott wasn’t so good, but Sam was really good. I did my own admin, but I should have hired an administrator. Tom was good too, but then he went off to a bigger job. Two of the people that I worked with did finally get their high school equivalency and found better jobs after that, and I was happy for them.
You ask me if I enjoyed my time as the owner of Arthur Refrigeration and Appliance. You’re often in a survival mode, as the business owner. My employees were making more net cash than me at times. But you keep keeping on. My fingertips are tender now due to wear and tear against the hot and cold surfaces I had to handle daily. When I decided to wind down the business and retire, it took me three years. Clients wouldn’t let me go even after I sent letters and left annual contracts un-renewed. It took a while to wind down my inventory. In 2017 I put the Miller St building where the shop was for sale and after it sold I worked from a temporary space till the end of 2019, when I finally turned off the telephones. Then it still took me a year to wrap up all the tax work and the rest of it. And I finally found myself with enough time to attend the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings if I felt like it.
During Covid I discovered these great continuing education courses on poetry and literature. I felt my writing skill was going down over the years and while I was always good with numbers, English was always a challenge and that bothered me. Now I’m experimenting with fiction… and poetry. It’s great. Keren and I travel a lot, visit each other’s extended families and our adult children and their kids. We used to go to the theatre a lot, but she’s had some health issues lately and we’re going out less now. I make sure I am available to her now that she occasionally needs help with day-to-day things, rides to the medical appointments and so on. We’ve always been there for each other.
As told to Long Play, July 2024
The Tinker
A poem by Arthur Jacobs
.
There it be, at my feet
Laying in a piled heap,
The discard of an older sib.
The dusty bones of a broken red bicycle.
A wheel here, a chain there.
Unlike a Picasso, it was not a pretty sight.
.
Yet, I had hopes in the way it looked.
Like Phoenix rising.
Will the bike, take flight?
Unlike a red carpet. It won’t be magic.
.
Bike assembly, takes logic,
The theory and practice of assembly.
The relationship between a screw and a nut.
The love of bonding, Amen.
.
All tools aside, my thrill on the first ride.
Decades later and many reconstructed bikes
The “Tinker” becomes me.
All just rewards taken in stride.
.
With pride, never say die.
For the "Tinker", Survives!
(July 22, 2024)
