The Community Repair Experience
Thanks for all you do for our planet.…Will the zipper lady be there Saturday?
— Email from a frequent Repair Cafe guest
It’s a repair day across the USA. In Palo Alto, California, Peter Skinner, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and environmentalist who founded the first U.S. Repair Cafe in 2012, is helping Repair Cafe volunteers set up at the Museum of American Heritage. The museum, housed in a home built in 1907, features an eclectic collection of electrical and mechanical devices and inventions dating from the 1750s through the 1950s. Set in a residential neighborhood, the building is too small to accommodate the thirty-plus volunteers and approximately one hundred people who will come seeking repairs, so Skinner and others are erecting tents on the lawn to shelter the check-in team and the coaches who will work on bikes and lawn mowers. Another team, including mechanical engineering and product design students from nearby Stanford University, is setting up shop in the building behind the historic house. These “apprentice fixers” run power cords to the workbenches, each furnished with a vise and tools, where the students will soon be seated next to an experienced fixpert. A half hour before opening, Skinner gathers everyone for an orientation meeting and thanks volunteers and sponsors for their contribution — “a stitch in the fabric of community.”
On any second Saturday of any month in Ellensburg, Washington, a small group of five or six friends dedicated to conservation, community, and sustainability — gathered by Repair Cafe organizer Don Shriner, a steam engineer by trade — meet at a restaurant for breakfast at eight AM. Some have taken the day off from work; others have traveled close to a hundred miles to attend. They may not have seen each other for several weeks, but the familiarity with which they greet each other shows their common purpose. Today they are going to help the community and the planet, and they’ll help each other become better people by helping others. After breakfast, they drive to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Cemetery, where a 1,600-square-foot shop stands central amid backhoes, tractors, and mowers. Inside the shop, headstones waiting for names to be added and some already prepared and awaiting placement stand next to tools of the trade laid out on work benches. Shelves lined with welding gear, lubricants, air compressors, and other equipment reveal the face of the many projects that are undertaken there. Ellensburg, Washington, is home to one of North America’s oldest rodeos, and so they call their events the Rodeo City Repair Cafe, and the I.O.O.F. Cemetery shop is command central.
On Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, a Fixit Clinic sponsored by the Wellfleet Recycling Committee and Boomerang Bags (whose members stitch donated textiles into sustainable shopping bags to be given away for free) is held in the Wellfleet Public Library’s meeting room. Built in the 1930s, the former factory (making curtains, then candles) became a library in 1972. Library Outreach Coordinator Gabrielle Griffis, who is responsible for the setup of the clinic’s physical space, creates flyers and other forms of publicity a month in advance of the events. Jed Foley of the Wellfleet Recycling Committee is responsible for recruiting volunteer Fixit coaches. A week before the clinic, coaches meet to discuss their goals, their skills, and the tools that they’ll bring to help people fix their things at the library. Griffis, who is also the clinic’s official greeter and traffic flow manager, says, “Keeping items out of the landfill is one of the clinic’s major goals, but it’s not guaranteed — whereas learning is!”
In Bolton, Massachusetts, organizer Ray Pfau, who learned about the Repair Cafe concept from his wife, Catherine, greets Repair Cafe volunteers as they set up in the Florence Sawyer School cafeteria. Unlike the cafe’s previous location, the school doesn’t charge a custodial fee. Plus, there’s space in the large, well-lit room for at least twenty-five volunteers, one hundred fifty people seeking repairs, eight to ten rectangular tables on rollers, and a couple of round tables in the middle where people can sit, snack, and chat. Ray, a former schoolteacher, software engineer, and self-described “general fixer,” is kept busy making sure that things are running smoothly, so he doesn’t have time to fix things at his own cafe, the second one in Massachusetts. But he enjoys the opportunity to sharpen knives and other implements when he visits one of the other thirty-three Repair Cafes, Fixit Clinics, and other repair events in his state, many of which he helped get started.
Ray’s grandson, seventeen-year-old Tyler Bernotas, is the founder and organizer of the Repair Cafe in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, thirty miles northwest of Philadelphia. When the original location, a maker-space, was no longer available, Bernotas moved his event to the town’s Technical College High School, which has ample parking, a helpful staff, and space to spread out as they grow. Currently, the Repair Cafe uses the school’s cafeteria, a forty-five by twenty-five-foot room designed to serve sixty students. People seeking repairs sit comfortably at tables, waiting their turn to work with the coaches, or they wander the room, watching the progress of other repairs. The team will attempt to fix almost anything but specializes in bikes, textiles, electronics, lamps, small appliances, and knife and bladed tool sharpening.
Don Fick, who runs his own media company, is the organizer of Repair Cafe NC in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Workshops are held in the Scrap Exchange, an anchor to Durham’s emerging creative reuse arts district. Founded in 1991, the Scrap Exchange was established to divert excess materials from business and residential sources. It’s a twenty-thousand-square-foot mash-up of thrift store, craft supply, and art gallery, where visitors might find bolts of fabric, lab equipment, electrical switches, and vintage home furnishings. Repair workshops are held in its Design Center, equipped with worktables and sewing machines. The space can accommodate up to twelve active repair projects at one time. With easy access to the materials available for sale, repair coaches and guests frequently source repair parts from the many items in the store. It is common to see scrap metal, wire, and other materials finding new purpose as drawer supports, lamp cords, and other creative reuses.
Repair Cafe NC events are also held in the Cary Senior Center. With just thirty minutes of setup, repair coaches transform an open multipurpose ballroom into a Santa’s Workshop of repair. Several eight-foot-long banquet tables, each with one or two coaches, are arranged in a horseshoe pattern, with four to six chairs at each. The Senior Center offers excellent accessibility for guests of all ages. For guests with bulky items, two or three volunteers from Cary’s Teen Council are on hand to assist, and they often become involved in repair themselves. With high school college-track curriculums leaving little or no time for industrial arts education, Repair Cafe offers these teens a chance to see the practical benefit and to experience the satisfaction of repair.
“We celebrate the cafe for its contribution to repair the ‘beloved, but broken’ items and to create a community crossroads, showing us all that fixing can be fun!”
— Michael J. Newhard, Mayor, Village of Warwick
In advance of Warwick’s Repair Cafe, home to Orange County, New York’s first Repair Cafe, the questions have been arriving for days via phone, email, and text: “Can you fix my backpack’s busted zipper?” “Can someone sew legs back on a stuffed unicorn?” “Can you sharpen a machete?” We always answer, “We won’t know ’til we see it, but if you can carry it in, our team will give it their best shot.”
The Repair Cafe doesn’t officially start until Saturday morning at ten o’clock, but by quarter after nine, people are already streaming into the parking lot of the Senior Center behind the Town Hall. Just like at a yard sale, there are always “early birds.” A man holding a clumsily folded, orange-and-white-striped, long-sleeved shirt says he’d taken it to a dry cleaner earlier that morning to have the worn collar turned, but the young woman behind the counter said, “We don’t do that.” The man next in line had suggested, “Take it to the Repair Cafe,” and here he is. An elderly couple sits, side by side, on the bench outside the building’s double doors. She cups a white cardboard box in her hands. He, holding a broken blender, asks, “Who’s in charge? Do we need to sign in?”
We thank the visitors for coming and tell them, “We’ll be happy to help just as soon as we’re set up. Give us about twenty minutes.” The volunteer coaches, who live in nine different towns, arrive and begin to unload the tools of their trades — sewing machines, thread, bobbins, fabric scraps, whetstones and oil, boxes stuffed with extension cords, power strips, lamp sockets, wire, nails, screws, assorted glues and clamps, a bike stand. They call out their hellos, hold the doors for each other, ask about families, vacations. But the question on everyone’s mind is “What do you think they’ll bring in today?” Then, one by one, they move their cars and trucks as far away from the Senior Center’s entrance doors as possible to make it easier for the visitors to unload their things.
A couple of volunteers walk to the highway turnoff, just beyond the Town Complex’s parking lot entrance, where they plant the plastic yard signs sporting the Hudson Valley Repair Cafe logo, one facing in each direction. Other volunteers post signs inside the Senior Center to indicate various repair stations — “Small Electrics,” “Digital Devices and Electronics,” “Knife and Tool Sharpening,” “Jewelry,” “Things Made of Wood,” “Textiles and Soft Toys,” “Bikes,” and so on, as well as funny and inspirational quotes, like “Worry never fixes anything” and “I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.” Repair seekers and volunteers often use their cell phones to photograph their favorite signs.
The sewing team members — Liz Bonita, Joan Bono, Mary Bono, Raheli Harper, Regina Shaw, Deanne Singer, and Lenny Valentino — arrange their tables, supplies stashed underneath, parallel to the electrical outlets spaced along the outside wall. The snack table needs outlets too, for the coffee maker and tea kettle. The jewelry repair coaches — Barb Barron, Cathé Linton, and Suzanne O’Brien — like the natural light in the corner by the piano.
The small electrics team — Larry Bastanza, FixIt Bob Berkowitz, Tom Bonita, Jerry Fischetti (who volunteered for our very first Repair Cafe on his eighty-eighth birthday), Ken Garrison, Frank O’Brien, Jim Pfitzner, and Ken Winterling — sets up across the room from the seamstresses, where they have access to bright orange extension cords and another bank of outlets to plug in their gear. The Kids Take It Apart Table is positioned next to them, opposite the welcome/check-in table, which is stacked with house rules and job ticket forms, baskets of pens, and the donation jar. Fixes are free, but there are expenses — insurance, printing of flyers and signs, repair supplies, snacks for all, and pizza for the volunteers’ lunch.
The digital devices team, headed by Rob Shaw, also needs multiple outlets, so the team sets up along the same wall as small electrics. Roger Bergman and Rich White arrange the bike repair station at the back of the room and unfold the metal bike workstand. Fred Rossi, the first of the knife/tool sharpening team to arrive, arranges the sharpening tables in the middle of the room, behind Edwin Winstanley’s wooden things and miscellaneous repairs table. All the volunteers, and sometimes several of the early birds seeking repairs, help arrange lines of chairs in front of each set of tables for the visitors.
A member of Sustainable Warwick, our sponsor, might arrive with a collection of small items, brand new or in good repair, and so we set up a give-away table next to the table stocked with DIY and how-to-repair books and magazines. Charles Hemstreet, who manages the Warwick Ecumenical Food Pantry, a community outreach ministry of the Warwick United Methodist Church, stops by to drop off two large rubber tubs, which will be used to collect the anticipated donations of canned and boxed food.
We can smell the coffee now, so it’s time to usher our visitors to the welcome/check-in table. Cheryl Karlin, who can knit and explain the house rules at the same time, hands each person a job ticket and asks them to complete the “What’s Wrong with It?” section, then sign the liability waiver that states, “If you offer items for repair, you do so at your own risk. Organizers, sponsors, and repair persons are not liable for any physical damage or loss resulting from work performed at the RC. Persons making repairs offer no guarantees and are not liable if objects that are repaired in the RC turn out to not work properly at home.”
Visitors are sometimes surprised to learn that Repair Cafes don’t offer a drop-off service. We expect people seeking repairs to remain with their items while our volunteers work to fix them. Larry James, a Repair Cafe co-organizer and coach in Lincoln, Nebraska, says that the visitor can help by keeping track of screws or providing an extra pair of hands to hold things steady. There’s a dual advantage: “Explaining what I’m doing makes things clearer in my mind, especially when troubleshooting. And if the fix is beyond what we can do, the person will usually be able to understand why.”
The welcome/check-in team — which also includes Dee, who volunteers to help multiple organizations; Teresa Gochal, a retired assistant school principal; Nanette Furneau, whose smile is as bright as her eyes; Joan Maxwell, a retired CFO and director of operations; and Lisa Tencza, a school district business office assistant — sets the stage for the whole Repair Cafe experience. They warmly greet visitors and cheerfully explain the process for first-timers. To aid our marketing outreach efforts, they ask visitors how they heard about us and how frequently they’ve been here, and later, they solicit feedback and ask permission to take photos of happy people holding their freshly fixed items. The team members take turns seating repair seekers in the appropriate fix-it station line to wait their turn (first come, first served), but not before inviting them to visit the snack table. There is fresh fruit and beverages, and thirteen-year-old Ellie, who loves to bake, has just surprised us with a chocolate cake, still warm from the oven, and a bowl of freshly whipped cream to top it off. At another table, a registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator distributes free glucose meters, healthy lifestyle tips, recipes, and truly tasty, healthy apple-walnut snacks.
One of our greeters says hello to Ellie’s mom, waiting in the lamps line, and spots the broken blender man’s wife perched on a bench behind the Kids Take It Apart Table. The elderly woman is so tiny that her feet don’t reach the floor. She looks tired. “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee while you’re waiting your turn?” “No, thank you. I don’t mind waiting for someone to help me. I had a lot of practice in the hospital.” The woman goes on to say that she and her husband were injured in a Thanksgiving Day crash so severe that the rescue team had to use the jaws of life tool to extract him from their car. They were both hospitalized; she has had several surgeries and a long recovery. Asked what she brought to be repaired, the woman lifts a glass and wrought iron sculpture from the white box on the seat beside her. The piece is shaped like a kneeling angel, head bowed over hands folded in prayer. “It’s a night light. Her glass skirt lights up. I keep it by my bed to keep me awake long enough to thank God, before I go to sleep, for all the people who have helped me.”
“Two Kittens Chewed Wire”
Warwick could open a lamp store with the number of lamps brought to every Repair Cafe. Lamps are the most popular items brought in for repairs throughout the Hudson Valley and in most Repair Cafes in the United States. What’s wrong with them? Well, according to today’s job tickets, the problems include “flickers,” “fixture detached from base,” “won’t turn on — taken apart years ago,” “broken bulb socket,” “one side doesn’t work,” “doesn’t work when plugged in,” “wobbly base,” “two kittens chewed wire,” “three-way is a one-way,” “heater to lamp conversion,” “blown fuse,” “loose neck,” and “fell apart — put back together wrong?” The woman next in line announces, “See this? This is a dumb lamp! But it sits on my nightstand. I don’t want to have to spend eighty dollars on a new one just because I don’t know why this one doesn’t work.” She says that she heard about us from a neighbor who’d had her lamp fixed at the last cafe.
FixIt Bob Berkowitz, a former U.S. Navy Seabee who started a handyman business when he retired from a utility company, helps a nine-year-old girl clutching a lamp that had been given to her by her grandmother. Later he describes what happened next: “I explained to the mother what I did and why, so that she might be able to repair other lamps that have the same symptoms. After a few minutes of diagnosis and a small repair, my young customer was very happy to see the lamp light up and stay lit. I love, love to see children and grownups thrilled that a personal and sentimental item has been repaired and brought back to life.”
Ken Winterling, a retired telecommunications engineer, always tries to involve customers in the repair of their devices. Ken shows people how to hold a meter probe on a test point and asks them to read the display. Then he explains how the circuit works, what he’s measuring, and the expected reading. When the problem is found, he explains how he located it. After the item is fixed, he has the customers test it again so that they can see for themselves how the meter display looks different on a working device. Winterling got an education one morning when he worked on a table lamp that had belonged to the customer’s family for many generations. When he removed the outer cover surrounding the lamp socket, many generations of highly compacted dead bugs tumbled out. And there was something shiny in the powdery pile of bug bits — a single, gold-filigree earring! The lamp owner had no idea who owned the earring. Ken guessed that it had been lost by someone who changed the light bulb long ago.
There are lots of problem clocks in Warwick today. A cuckoo clock is driving its owner cuckoo because it “chimes at 20 minutes to the hour.” Another timepiece needs replacement motor-hands installed. The job ticket for another simply states, “It fell.” A wooden mantle clock “will not stay running.” Ken Garrison, a former high school physics teacher, solves that problem for the owner, who sheepishly admits, “My mechanical error. Wound it in the wrong direction.”
The First Step Is Figuring Out What’s Wrong
With any repair, the first step is the diagnosis. “Sometimes the challenge is not how to fix an item,” says Naomi Aubain at the Repair Cafe in New Paltz, New York, “but in figuring out how to get the owner to tell you exactly what is wrong with it. A common response can be ‘It just stopped working!’ — usually said with a quizzically innocent look on their face. My first thought is usually ‘What did you do to it?’ The second is, ‘How do I find out?’”
Naomi’s favorite example of this phenomenon is the story of the older woman who carried in a chiming pendulum mantle clock that had belonged to her mother. After working well for many years, it had stopped. After examining the clock and fiddling with the key and inner workings, Naomi still couldn’t find anything wrong. It was time to play Twenty Questions. But almost immediately, she realized the clock’s owner had no idea how it worked. None! Aside from having to wind it each week, not once had she looked inside or examined it in any way. “Okay,” thought Naomi, “now I know what to do. It’s lesson time.” She figured the clock had stopped working because of a sideways motion that interrupted the pendulum’s swing. Likely it had been pushed while someone was dusting or rearranging things on the mantle. So her lesson started with the pendulum and how it works. “Who knew you had to be a detective, a psychologist, and a teacher to be a fixer person at the Repair Cafe? It was rewarding to have figured out what was wrong with the clock, even though it was really nothing. Oddly, it was also disappointing to not have actually fixed anything, at least something tangible. I guess I fixed the clock owner’s lack of understanding. Hopefully she will remember our little lesson and be able to ‘fix’ her clock in the future.”
Sometimes repairs proceed by trial and error. Charles Goedeke, a retired electrical engineer and organizer of a Repair Cafe in Howard County, Maryland, that travels to different libraries, senior centers, and churches, recalls trying to fix a microwave oven. After commiserating with the other coaches about how hard manufacturers make it to fix such appliances, he asked the customer, “Have you tried bouncing it?” That elicited some quizzical looks, so Charles reached over and bounced it on the counter a couple of times. “A mug of water was produced as a test case. We fired it up, and it worked! As far as I know it’s still working.”
“Busted Butt” and “Wires Broken”
The small electrics team tackles problems with a can opener, a blender, a label maker, a kelly-green vintage floor fan, a hole punch, a curling iron, a hairdryer (“sparks and smells bad when you turn it on”), a printer, a paper shredder, a weed whacker, three radios — a portable radio (“doesn’t work”), a clock radio (“same”), and a third (“tuner string off track”) — a Victrola (“buttons pushed”), food processors (both automatic and hand-cranked), a Mr. Coffee machine (“Not hot enough? Coffee too weak”), an adding machine (“When you turn it on it just runs and you can’t type in anything”), three vacuum cleaners, a musical jewelry box, an air compressor, a doorbell (“doesn’t ring”), a metal horse (“busted butt”), a CD player (“drawer opens and closes by itself”), and a hat (“wires broken”). A woman brings in a rotary dial phone, seeking “advice to make it interactive for 1960s historical society exhibit.” Ken Garrison will take it home to fix it for her.
“I keep telling people about the amazing amount of cat hair that I’ve pulled out of vacuums.”
— Charles Goedeke
Warwick’s Repair Cafe, like most, sees vacuum cleaners at every event. “Doesn’t work” and “clogged hose” are among the most common complaints. Today, one has a simple diagnosis: “Appears to be working okay — should replace vac bag.” Ken Winterling, who volunteers at six different Repair Cafes, tells us about a creative solution to a clogged hose that didn’t include an actual repair. An elderly woman brought a vacuum cleaner hose with an attached extension wand to a different Repair Cafe. She blamed her arthritic hands as the reason she couldn’t press the release button hard enough to disconnect the wand. Turned out, the latch mechanism was broken, and parts were no longer available because the manufacturer was out of business. So Winterling and Barry Eldridge, who works with Ken at the Repair Cafe in Middletown, New York, put their heads together and discovered that when they turned the nozzle upside down, gravity caused the latch to disengage and the wand could easily be disconnected, even by a senior citizen with arthritic hands. Today, in Warwick, a woman brings in an older model vacuum “‘that can go from a wood floor to carpet to tile.” The repair coach replaces a missing spring, and as the customer leaves, she waves her job ticket over her head. “Fixed! Thanks! It was going to the curb.”
Repairs of electrical appliances and devices are in demand everywhere. “I’ve been threatening/planning/hoping to go to one of the Hudson Valley Repair Cafes for three years,” recalled Robin Romeo. She had been “holding onto broken things with a vague plan and then throwing them out.”
Last week my paper shredder refused to shred a twelve-page booklet halfway through the process. I love my paper shredder. It makes junk mail almost as exciting as a check in the mail, so when I saw a Repair Cafe scheduled for the following week (miraculously), I went! Such a lovely community of people — impossible to tell from the look or the vibe, the difference between the owners of broken items and the angels there to fix them. After a brief and comfortable wait, I brought my paper shredder up to the table where the “guy who fixes stuff like that” sat. I handed over my shredder and he looked it up and down, adjusted his glasses, and then — without the slightest hint of irony — said, “You know you can replace these things for around eighty-nine dollars.” And then he fixed it! I can’t wait to break something again.
Warwick’s Repair Cafe team, like others throughout the Hudson Valley, usually sees at least one or two dysfunctional sewing machines. Today, a woman complains that her machine’s “bobbin winder won’t work.” A man brings in a machine with a faulty pressure foot. He’s tried, and failed, to fix it for his elderly mother, who relies on it to mend sheets and clothing. Frank O’Brien, a retired telecom operations manager, discovered that it needed only to be oiled. Jackie Carter, who organizes the Repair Cafe at the public library in Moscow, Idaho, says, “I always tell people when they get a sewing machine, ‘Get a good used one because the new ones are so lightweight you can throw them across the room’ — and that’s about what you should do with them.”
Rich White, a guy who “can fix whatever anyone who has owned a home for fifty years can do,” and Roger Bergman, who owned a bicycle shop for forty-nine years, often team up. “R&R,” as we call them, are working on a multicolor, cast iron mechanical bank, circa 1907, that the owner says he gave to his son for Christmas. The action is supposed to involve Teddy Roosevelt pointing his rifle at a black bear cub hiding in a tree trunk, but nothing is happening. After R&R adjust a spring, the president and the bear are again able to play hide and seek. Immediately following that accomplishment, a man arrives with a heavy, metal cheese grater that he says he “bought thirty years ago for one hundred and fifty dollars.” Problem? “The suction sucks — need to install new suction cup to secure it to table.” Our guys fix that, too. The delighted owner says, “Awesome, perfect!” Roger quips, “Now you can make America grate again!”
WHAT HAPPENS AT REPAIR CAFE DOESN’T STAY AT REPAIR CAFE
Even when Warwick doesn’t have a Repair Cafe scheduled, Rich White volunteers, May to September, collecting and refurbishing secondhand bikes to donate to the HRHCare – Alamo Farmworkers Community Center in Goshen, New York, a few miles from Warwick. Mario Fernandez, one of the organization’s outreach workers, told Rich that many of the migrant seasonal workers, living on more than fifty farms, depend on donated bikes as their only form of transportation.
Some bikes are donated by friends and neighbors whose children have outgrown them. Others come from the police department’s roundup of unclaimed bikes found in parks or along the roads. Driving around town, Rich keeps his eyes peeled for unwanted bikes. Recently, he spotted three bikes at the end of a driveway, parked his car, and knocked on the homeowner’s front door to ask permission to take them. A silver one, in such good condition that it needed only to be dusted, estimated value fifteen hundred dollars, came from a woman who volunteers with Rich at another organization, who said that her deceased husband “would be smiling from heaven to know that his bike would go to someone who really needs it.” Over the last two years, White has donated thirty-plus refurbished bikes to new owners.
Kid Stuff
It is best when we act like we are one family.
— Jay Hart, repair coach, Newburyport, Massachusetts
Michele, organizer of the Green Ossining Repair Cafe in Ossining, New York, fondly remembers “hanging out under my family’s dining room table as a child, using a screwdriver to loosen and tighten the screws on the chairs, just for the joy of it.” Now she finds it fun to work with others to solve problems and create community. “It is amazing to me that in the two years we have been providing these events, we have collectively kept hundreds of items out of the landfill. The feeling of kindness among strangers is a rich community builder. Some people come with loneliness, as well as a need for a new elastic waistband for their pants. They love visiting with the volunteers and sharing stories of their own. People leave feeling that people still do care about each other.”
At Repair Cafes, families are always welcome. And families volunteer. In Warwick, Jim Harper, a senior project manager for an engineering website, volunteers with sons Able (eight) and Eli (five) to man the Kids Take It Apart Table — putting things back together not required. “Our boys never complain about going to the RC. Able loves the time he spends at the table,” says his mom, Raheli, a volunteer mending and sewing expert. What kinds of things do the kids take apart? Well, today, a woman whose hair dryer can’t be fixed is pleased to donate it to what she called the “reuse play station,” commenting, “It’s better there than in the landfill.” And a couple who had things repaired by the small electrics team at the previous cafe stops by just to drop off a cassette recorder, a clock radio, and a camera. Boys and girls wielding tiny screwdrivers dive right in. The mother of a six-year-old boy says that when her son was only four, he took apart the family vacuum cleaner and put it back together all by himself. “We don’t have enough stuff for him to work on. He usually can’t sit still, but he hasn’t moved since he sat down at the kids’ table.” Pointing to Jim, who is explaining how a glowing miniature light bulb works, she adds, “I think he enjoys it as much as the kids!” At the end of each event, Jim stores everything yet to be taken apart in his basement until the next cafe. Items that have been reduced to bits are dropped off at the Best Buy store or the e-waste recycling center at the County Transfer Station.
Rob Shaw, a systems administrator who works in tech support, brings along his fifteen-year-old daughter, Raven, and his twin, twenty-year-old sons, Nathaniel and Zachary, to learn and help diagnose digital device problems. Today, the team deals with several smartphones, laptops, a tablet that “only charges to 20 percent,” and a pair of headphones. They salvage a Macintosh computer (“Disk successfully removed. Hard drive needs replacement”), two DVD players (“Doesn’t show video” and “Doesn’t play the discs”), and a computer that needs updates. Rob tells the owner of one computer (“just stopped working”) that he will “be in touch later with the right part.” A computer with a “hidden software” problem is, according to the owner, “made better, anyway.” Another customer writes on her job ticket, “Twin boys cleared cell phone storage. Excellent.” The family team shows another owner how to delete items to increase his device’s speed. Rob’s wife, Regina, is an artist and volunteers her sewing skills. “The Repair Cafe is one part of why I moved my family from New Jersey to Warwick. Even if I change one person’s outlook on consumerism or turn trash back into treasure, I feel I’ve made a difference, so I’ll keep coming back.”
In Newburgh, New York, Damian DePauw, president and CFO of an organization whose mission is to increase civic participation in impoverished communities through volunteering, organizes a Repair Cafe in conjunction with members of the Together We Can Timebank. A dedicated TimeBank member brought in a computer hard drive that had failed many years before. She’d saved the device because it contained photos of her husband, who had passed away five years earlier. Two repair coaches teamed up to get into the hard drive, extract the files, and put them on another drive for her. She teared up as she looked at a few of them and then said that although she had made plans for the rest of the evening, she just wanted to go home to see all the photos of the husband she misses so dearly.
A boy who wanted to fix a part on his game console approached coach Tom Treat at the Repair Cafe in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The boy had already researched what needed to be done, but he didn’t have the proper tools to open the console. Tom lent the boy the right-size screwdriver and supported him with a “few well-placed words of encouragement and direction.” Then, Tom explained, “he dove in. He wore such a look of empowerment.”
Not every kid is comfortable with “hands-on” experiences, but any child can still have a role to play. Colleen M. Johnston, the organizer of the Repair Fair in Milwaukie, Oregon, says, “My youngest son is on the autism spectrum, and he has participated every year as a spectator watching others repair.” At the Warwick Repair Cafe, Scott Cheney, a musician who volunteers to fix fretted instruments — guitars, mandolins, ukuleles — has brought along one of his adult guitar students, who is also on the autism spectrum. The duo perform a lively concert for us. At this same event, Scott also appraises an old violin as “useful for a student.” A woman waiting to have her knives sharpened overhears and says she knows of a young girl who needs an instrument. She volunteers to deliver the violin to the girl’s parents, who are members of her church. The violin’s owner is delighted that her deceased grandfather’s instrument will bring joy to a new generation.
A Cut Above
The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.
— Confucius
The blade sharpening station — specializing in non-serrated knives, scissors, and garden tools — is second to lamps in popularity. Today Warwick’s team works on a pair of cuticle clippers, a hatchet, a World War II–era machete captured by a U.S. Marine stationed in the Philippines, now used to hack weeds, seven pairs of scissors, a drawer full of assorted kitchen knives, garden shears, grass shears (“screw walks”), a hand pruner, three hedge pruners, lopping shears, and six pairs of other clippers. A tall woman walks in, brandishing a pruning tool at least six feet long. She cackles and says, “I’m the grim reaper! I want to get the saw back on the pole.”
Today’s sharpening team includes Roger Moss, a beekeeper and bread baker who once operated his own catering business; Fred Rossi, a retired auto parts/machine shop owner and volunteer firefighter; and Brian Fitzsimmons, who runs his own energy-efficient, commercial lighting and controls systems business. One of Fred’s visitors is so grateful to have sharp blades again that she tells him, “I was going to go out for dinner, but now that my knives are sharp, I’m going home to cook.” Another woman exclaims, “Now all we need is a roast!” Another draws a happy face on her job ticket and scribbles, “Great Advice Too!” A middle-aged man wearing a baseball cap stands in the middle of the room, clutching a three-foot-long pair of freshly sharpened tree loppers to his chest. On his way out, he writes in the guest book: “I love this — everyone here is so warm and friendly. Need to go home and break stuff just so I can come back.” A woman tells Brian that he should open a knife-sharpening station at the Sunday farmers’ market. “You’d make a lot of money.” He smiles and says, “I already have a job. This place is not about money. It’s about giving.”
Steve Carras, an attorney who loves to cook, divides his time between the sharpening table and working on cracked wooden chairs, gluing the broken hoof on a turquoise blue, Murano-style glass horse, and attaching a wooden birdhouse to a six-foot pole. He volunteers, he says, because “I love to experience the singular joy of repairing and reusing items and demonstrating that anyone — and everyone — can repair or restore everyday household items. I feel it is my duty to work with others toward the goal of greater self-reliance and to fight the onslaught of the ‘disposable’ goods industry so that future generations don’t look back at mine and say, ‘Why did you leave us such a mess?’”
Heidi Spinella, a self-employed management consultant, volunteers to repair small items — ceramics, wooden boxes, toys, eyeglasses
— at the Newburyport, Massachusetts, Repair Cafe. “My definition of local is planet Earth, so whether I know someone personally or not doesn’t matter — we are all related in one way or another. I believe everything has a spirit, and repairing things is a way to pay respect to the invisible source that animates all life.”
A woman brought Heidi a set of decorative plates purchased on her Mexican honeymoon thirty years before. They’d hung on her dining room wall, a tribute to love, until her little boy accidentally knocked them down. No one knew how to fix the plates, so they’d been stored in a box for decades. Now, her little boy is a man about to marry, and she wanted to give him the plates as a wedding gift. Heidi and the owner carefully glued all the plates and placed each one in a separate box, surrounded by paper, to keep them vertical until the epoxy set overnight. The woman left beaming.
Edwin Winstanley, a retired clinical chemist who also volunteers for the Catskill Mountain Railroad and the Empire State Railroad Museum, has been presented today with a sneaker (“bottom needs to be glued back on”), a mirror (“one side needs to be glued”), cracked basket handles, an Ethiopian ceramic cook pot with a broken “foot,” a piano bench, and several wooden tables. He’ll be able to mend them all.
Back during Warwick’s very first Repair Cafe, a man with a child’s rocker tucked under his arm walked in fifteen minutes before we had to vacate the space for another scheduled event. Told that there wasn’t enough time left to repair his rocker, he said, “I only want advice.” Edwin examined the rocker’s split seat, recommended the appropriate glue, and described how to clamp the seam shut without damaging the wood. “What about the scratches and dents? How do I clean them up?” Edwin, who also volunteers to make repairs at the historical society, winced. “It’s up to you, but I wouldn’t touch them. You said that the chair belonged to your wife when she was a child? Those scratches are part of its history.” The man nodded, and on the way out, dropped twenty dollars in the donation jar. “But we didn’t fix it!” said one of the greeters. “That’s okay. Now I know what to do.”
Many of the people who volunteer for the sewing team, in Warwick and elsewhere, are pros. Deanne Singer, a retired high school teacher, operates a tailoring, alteration, and custom sewing business. Deanne’s friend Joan Bono crafts one-of-a-kind teddy bears from discarded fur coats and repairs torn teddy bears, soft toys, and dolls. Mary Bono, no relation to Joan, is an illustrator and graphic designer who sells her vintage button jewelry and tote bags — hand-crocheted with plarn, strips cut from used plastic bags — in a local women’s craft co-op and her own Etsy site. Katy Banovic once worked for an outdoor gear repair business in Oregon. Now she has her own business providing sewing repairs on outdoor gear and clothing. At repair events in Newburyport, Massachusetts, she does all the repairs on zippers and heavy materials and specializes in tricky sewing problems.
Sewing teams typically work on clothing. Job tickets from previous events in Warwick record that the sewing team has altered, hemmed, mended, or shortened men’s and women’s pants and shorts, shirts, blouses, uniforms (one of which “needs snaps”), coats and jackets (“hanging loop torn on one side,” “does not zip properly,” and “button holes unraveling”), holey mittens, a leather catcher’s mitt, two torn bathrobes, and a silk, floral-print Japanese kimono (“sleeves too long. Afraid I’ll catch on fire at the stove”). The team has also restored and repaired zippers on clothing, backpacks, picnic and pet carriers, and a carrying case for a floor-standing harp. However, the range of textiles and their problems is much wider: moth-eaten sofa pillows and lounge chair cushions (“chewed by a dog”), a cervical pillow, a torn bar towel imported from an English pub, curtains, a woven rag rug, and a canvas log carrier. Today they craft a queen-sized blanket from two bunk-sized vintage Army blankets. Liz Bonita, a retired nurse who was recruited by her husband, Tom, a retired court administrator, part of the small electrics team, teaches a customer how to properly thread her own machine. Lenny Valentino, who taught herself to sew, encourages another visitor to sit beside her while she demonstrates how to replace a skirt’s elastic waistband.
Joan and Mary restore a “headless” teddy bear and reattach another bear’s torn ear, a doll’s arms, and two legs ripped from a stuffed toy unicorn with a lilac-colored horn. Then a young couple, the woman wearing a sparkling engagement ring, approaches the sewing tables. She carries a black-and-white cloth dog in her palm and says that the toy’s nose was chewed off by her living, breathing dog. Her fiancée explains the toy’s significance: his bride-to-be had been born prematurely; her parents had tucked the tiny toy into their daughter’s isolette. Clearly, this little toy holds a great deal of love. And it’s with love that Mary stitches the torn nose back onto the beloved toy’s face.
“More than once a parent has come in, followed by a teary-eyed toddler who’s holding a frayed, worn, torn ‘lovey,’” says Dära Salk, community outreach director and cofounder of a Repair Cafe held at Chicago’s second busiest library. “The look on their faces as the little item is carefully repaired by our ‘seamstress’ is worth more than any of us can say. These are the reasons we get up and out early on a cold, snowy, or rainy Saturday morning.” At the Repair Cafe sewing table, love is the thread that binds us.
Dan Barkevich, a repair coach at the Schenectady and Saratoga, New York, Repair Cafes, is an engineer who manages engineers, and he uses the same management skills as a volunteer because “repairing brings life to lifelessness.” At his very first cafe, a woman walked in cradling two dolls that had belonged to her for fifty years. They had fallen to pieces decades ago, but she’d kept them, and then she heard about the Repair Cafe and hoped someone there might be able to help. Although he had no experience with dolls, Dan stared at the pair for a long time. Then, with the assistance of the dolls’ owner, he used elastic, wire, and zip ties to reconstruct them. Proud of his accomplishment, Dan held the dolls for a moment, then handed them off to the tearful owner. “I will never forget the look she gave me…as if I had just restored a part of her youth.”
CAN THIS BE REPAIRED?
Jonathan Ment, who volunteers his carpentry skills at Repair Cafe events hosted by Transition Catskills, is also good with needle and thread. As a kid, he learned to sew patches on his Cub Scout uniform, and he even crafted a felt pillow with a hand-stitched Curious George monkey face on the front. At a recent Repair Cafe, Ment took a break from fixing things for others to show his vintage pillow to the sewing team. He wanted advice on how to mend the worn fabric and damaged stuffing. “I made this with my grandmother over forty years ago sitting at her kitchen table.…I’m not sure what to do with it now — or if it can even be repaired.” The seamstress and another volunteer took a hard look at the beloved pillow and decided “it’s folk art. Don’t fix it. Frame it.” So Jonathan will use his carpentry skills to build a suitable frame to “display this connection to my childhood and grandmother and other bits of art and memories.”
Fixers of Meaningful Things
Warwick’s jewelry repair team includes Cathe’ Linton, who for several years had a store on the village’s main street, selling her own designs and Native American silver pieces. Now she volunteers to serve her community, to stay in touch, and to meet other “fixers of meaningful things.” “Everything that comes in here has had a life,” she says. “We are not just fixing items. We are repairing souls.” Cathe’ is joined by Suzanne O’Brien, who sells her collection of “salvaged and refashioned fancies” on Etsy, and sometimes by multitalented Barb, who says, “Random acts of kindness make me feel good.” As a young teen, Barb taught herself how to make vases into lamps and beads into jewelry for her mother’s store, and at the Repair Cafe she shifts between lamp, jewelry, ceramics, and wooden repairs, depending upon the size of the repair-seeking crowd. This time, the team works on a watch, several bracelets, including a “14K link” (“broken jump ring,” “broken metal butterfly wing,” “tangled,” and “missing loop”). They shorten necklaces and repair a string of pearls (“clasp opens”), several pairs of earrings (“everything came apart,” “backward drops,” “back fell off,” “broken bead”), two rosaries, a mezuzah scroll case, and a miniature, carved wooden elephant with a tangled chain dragging a log.
Just as Suzanne is packing up, an older woman rushes in, clutching a braided silver chain. She has arrived late because she got lost and has been driving in circles for nearly an hour. Choking back tears, she says that she can’t afford to take her chain to a jewelry store to be repaired. Nor can she afford to wait a month for the next cafe. The chain has to be fixed today, now, because it supports an engraved cylinder that contains a loved one’s ashes. The woman has worn the chain all day, every day, since her grandson’s funeral. While Suzanne works on the damaged chain, the grieving grandmother shares the story behind the young man’s untimely and tragic death. After the restored chain with the cylinder is hooked once again around her neck, the woman sighs deeply, wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, hugs Suzanne, and says, “You don’t know what you’ve done today!”
Jewelry items such as these seem to be especially meaningful to visitors at all Repair Cafes. Barbara Lane, who worked as an elementary art teacher for more than thirty years, handles a lot of jewelry repairs at the New Paltz, New York, cafe. “Once, a young woman presented me with a bracelet formed with beads made from dried flowers. She teared up as she explained that the flowers were from her husband’s funeral. She was so fearful that it could not be repaired when all it needed was a simple jump ring and new clasp. By the end of the repair, we were both in tears. I still think about her, remembering the gratitude that she expressed as she left our table. It’s repairs like this that keep me coming back.”
“When I fix something for someone, even just a lamp or wobbly chair, it enhances their life, saves them some money, and makes me feel good. For a few moments, I am the person I want to be. That by itself would keep me coming back. Saving things from the landfill is just a bonus.” This is from Larry James, co-organizer of the Repair Cafe in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Back in Warwick, a woman, her husband, and his elderly father arrive twenty minutes before Warwick’s cafe is closing, with just enough time to sharpen their dull kitchen knives. The old gentleman sheds his jacket and scarf, arranges his cane, and seats himself to watch. After Brian, Roger, and Fred have sharpened several knives, by hand, on oiled whetstones, the man slowly stands up, pats down and rummages through all his pockets, and triumphantly hands over a battered pocketknife. When it is returned to him, he is visibly delighted with the newly sharpened blade. Then his family collects their cutlery and returns their job tickets to the check-in table, and the woman deposits ten dollars in the now-empty donation jar.
Cash has been counted, bills paid. Charles, the food pantry manager, has returned to collect the donations given throughout the day by our visitors. Now he is packing up boxes and cans, so Lisa, our treasurer, hands the woman’s tip to him. “But he’s not the one who sharpened our knives!” the woman protests. After Lisa explains who Charles is, the grateful woman takes out her wallet and hands him another twenty dollars for the food pantry.
At the end of any repair day, some of the volunteers need to scoot, but some like to linger. On a Wednesday evening at the Fixers Collective in Brooklyn, New York, after the last customer has left, Vincent Lai, Emily Forman, Joe Holdner, and David Kline sat around exchanging quips.
Vincent: What are we? I’ll tell you. We are an ongoing social experiment in aggressive asset recovery and improvisational fixing.
David: In plain English, we’re a bunch of tinkerers who like to work on stuff.
Joe: I’m a serial compulsive repairer.
Emily (in her best confessional voice): I’m also a serial compulsive fixer.
Vincent: I’ve even been called a Toolbox Detective.
Joe: Have you noticed that when you repair a lamp and the light goes on, the owner lights up also?
Emily: Nine times out of ten, it’s something so simple, there’s just no reason to throw it out. Well, eight times out of ten.
David: It’s important to me personally to feel I’m doing something good for the world.
Joe: You try to get people involved, and if we can show someone how it got done, even better.
Vincent: Well, we’re offering the world a highly immersive and interactive skill-share.
Emily: The one we did at the school for dogs was really hard. Woof!
Vincent: At the end of the day, everyone knows — or should know — that the most environmentally responsible item you have is the one you already own.
After Warwick’s volunteers have packed up their tools and supplies, taken down the signs, carried out the recyclables, reset the room’s tables and chairs the way we found them, and turned off the lights, Nick, a seventh-grader, says that he’s “had a great time, learned a lot — can fix my lamp at home.” Thirteen-year-old Ethan Bele, who also volunteered to acquire community service hours, says, “It’s nice to know that with the news saying so many sad and depressing stories, there’s a place where there are people who are willing to help you, no matter who you are, for no other reason than to help you in the best way possible. It gives me hope.”