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| Sucking it up: Vacuum cleaner repair just isn’t what it once was, and John Huling has closed his shop after more than 50 years
of unclogging tubes and unwrapping power brushes tangled in shag. Mary Knox Merrill – Staff |
The vacuum repair guy: an endangered species
After half a century of saving moms from Barbie clothes and carpet fringe, John Huling's fix-it shop bites the dust.
from the March 4, 2008 edition
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Huling's hunched shoulders straighten and his downtrodden expression lightens for a moment as he points out a favorite Electrolux in his dusty window: "That vac will be around long after we are. It's 30 years old. Some of them along the corner here are 40 years old. There's no vac made today that's going to be here 40 years from now."
Motioning to his continually ringing phone, he says, "This lady's calling me now because she can't get in during my hours." Huling says he can't compete with mall hours to accommodate today's frantic schedules.
"I need to sit," says the next in line – an elderly woman who perches on a stool in front of the counter. She's in search of a bag for her vacuum cleaner, whose model number she's forgotten.
"Was the machine yellow?" asks Huling.
Even before she answers in the affirmative, he has retrieved a special bag from a high shelf. He refuses payment, and the woman sums up what this man has meant to her: "I could come down and say, 'This is my problem. What do I do?' "
This is a question Huling, who has been fixing things ever since discovering his aptitude in an eighth grade "manual training" class, has been asking himself recently. "Working with my hands ... that's all I ever did," he says. "I could figure anything out." While attending Wentworth College in Boston, he worked for a watch hospital, but opened his own repair business in 1953.
Huling's wife, Theresa, has helped out in the shop during recent budget-cutting years. She, and the seven children they raised a block away, are the reason behind his chosen profession: "I could name my hours ... so when the kids were growing up, if one of my sons was in a play, I could break for a couple of hours and go over."
Now, he says, with a rueful smile, "My kids are all more loaded than I am. But they also get up every morning at 6 o'clock and go to work, which I could never do."
Though he doesn't regret his career choice, he admits he's envious of his children's retirement plans. His oldest son recently retired as a trombonist for the Washington National Symphony and the others work in what he describes as corporate settings. He has known for a long time that he wouldn't be handing down the family business.
• • •
Before the morning is over, Huling offers advice to the mother of an asthmatic child and spends a good amount of time with a man who has inherited a vacuum from his mother. Huling demonstrates how to remove the power brush wound around with shag carpeting. This leads to a story about a customer whose son purposely sucked up his mother's throw rug every time he was asked to vacuum.
A blizzard is reportedly blowing in, so Huling decides to close shop early.
I stall – not ready to face a future devoid of one man's affection for the beauty of well-made machinery. Before leaving the musty, memory-filled store, I ask what has been most satisfying for him: repairing machinery or helping people.
Without hesitation he answers, "The person that I fix things for usually appreciates it. The machine doesn't care whether it's fixed or not. A vac is a vac."
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