Deep Green on what's good -OR- Almost gone but not quite

I told one of my buddies from work that I was in dire straights. The ancient starter from my 1957 Ford tractor bit the dust. I know they still make replacement parts for these things. They were--and remain--incredibly popular tractors. Thousands are still in everyday use across America. They may have actually been the last good, solid product ever produced by that company.

Looking on the Internet, I found a rebuilt and guaranteed starter for $175. That was the best price I could come up with. And I figured, well, that's fair enough. The old war horse has been worked hard all its life, and $175 in repairs every few years seemed appropriate.

But my friend, who was born and raised locally, upon hearing this said, "Aw, HELL no! We can get it fixed a lot cheaper than that!"

He proceeded to tell me some strange tale about an odd little shop where two guys rebuilt, by hand, electrical odds and ends from the past. While telling me about them and simultaneously giving me hopelessly confused directions, it sounded to me as if this could in fact be one of those genuine rural anomalies, like a REAL hardware store, one where you could buy just about anything ever manufactured by human hands for the past two hundred years. Such places exist, but they're dying out quickly.

My friend said, "Well, okay. Let me describe the place like this. You know your barn? Well, this building is in worse shape than that. And you have to shoehorn yourself in, 'cause it's stacked from floor to roof with boxes of old parts, some of them completely new and unused, from before World War Two all the way up to the present."

Well, I had to go just to see the place. It was in Tangiers, a tiny dot on some Indiana maps, about 15 miles northwest of Rockville, the Parke county seat. I asked my friend if he'd like to go, and he said sure. So, armed with a navigator and a disabled 51 year old tractor starter, off we went.

It was one of those buildings you drive by in places where you never stop, when you're taking a backroad shortcut from one highway to the other, a building that you would have imagined had been abandoned since shortly after the Korean War days. Tangiers is a mighty metropolis of about seven or eight houses, an abandoned gas station, and one large and mysterious foundation from a very old building that is no longer there, a foundation of the style popular during the
late part of the 19th Century and early 20th Century. And that was it. Just the foundation. A large tree grew out of the ground from the middle of the thing. God only knows what it might have been at one time, perhaps a church, perhaps a general store. Whatever it was, it wasn't there anymore.

We got out of my truck and I went around back to grab the starter out of the bed. An evil-looking dog came walking by slowly, checking both of us out. While I was grabbing the starter, my friend kept a wary eye on the dog. It kept moving back and forth, trying to stay directly behind me as I bent over the truck bed.  Friendly dogs don't do that. I mentioned this to my pal after I got the starter out and he agreed. This dog was not friendly at all, nor did it even pretend to be. So, facing the dog and walking backwards, we entered the building and
stepped back in time one half of a century.

I remember my Dad taking me to places like this when he needed a part or something that he could not fix (a rare event indeed) repaired. The same smell of old oil and cardboard. The clattery heater fans overhead, the poor lighting, small work benches in three or four spots, loaded to the point of avalanche with tools, old parts, ancient bench grinders, containers with many drawers for small parts, each drawer marked with masking tape and pencil telling of its contents, or at least what it used to contain. They had pathways through the crates and
boxes that were stacked taller than a man. If they didn't have to walk there, the area was part of their stockroom. It was no longer 2009. It was 1958, maybe '59. I looked around and knew my friend had brought me to precisely the right place, the exact kind of place I needed right now.

Despite the clattering of the overhead gas heaters, the building was cold. I was glad I had my coat on. There were two old men working there, one wearing insulated coveralls that had been greasy since, apparently, the Kennedy Administration, and another wearing a workman's blue shop pants and matching shop jacket. Plus a toboggan. They spoke little to each other, communicating mostly in grunts or nods of the head. When they did speak, it was to mock or
make fun of the other one. They'd probably worked together since I was in high school in that same little building and had formed their own language, one that was short in words but all they needed to pass every working day and take care of whatever problem someone dragged through the door.

Despite their lack of chatter among themselves, they were both quite friendly to whomever walked in. I assume this because I had never been there before, had never met either man, and was not in fact sure exactly where I was. There was no sign of any kind on the gray and dingy old building. Just a cracked old asphalt parking area littered with huge truck axles, heavily rusted engine blocks, and a huge set of ramps, each hand cut from a giant tree and now soaked forever with motor oil. The gentleman with the toboggan greeted me. The other fellow never
even looked up, busy working on some unidentifiable device and muttering under his breath.

"Whatcha got there, young man?"

"Starter from a '57 ford 800 series tractor. Lots of people call it an 8N model,
but it's not. It's an 800. The motor spins but it doesn't engage or try to start."

"Well, you and your friend find somewhere to sit down. We'll be with you in a
minute."

I parked myself on an old metal stool and Mike, my buddy, examined a dangerous-looking ancient office chair before he sat in it. There were a man and woman in there too, obviously other customers, and eventually we began making small talk.

It's something urban people do not understand. In situations like this, a stranger will ask you friendly but remotely probing questions. Mike answered for us both. And sure enough, it turned out the couple were man and wife and they knew someone that Mike knew, so all conversation seemed to lighten at that point. They had established who we were. This confused the hell out of me when I moved out here. But it's apparently important in this culture to have some kind
of identity, even if you just both happen to know some of the same people, or if you went to a certain high school, or if there is anything that could remotely be called a link between you and a perfect stranger. Mike and the married couple both knew a farmer in between Tangiers and Rockville, and both parties commented on his rotten luck this year trying to put out a crop during the early summer's torrential rains. I made small talk about the awful electrical storms and winds during that period, and the couple relaxed even more. I was a local, and therefore one of them.

Urban folks wouldn't give a toot on a tin whistle if they knew anyone there or not. And this is what identifies them. While they still would have been treated in a courteous fashion, they would have been outsiders, and therefore people you didn't joke with, chat, or kid around, people with whom you were reservedly polite. While this sounds odd and perhaps even standoffish, it's not. It's a form of communication too. It's everyone's way of saying, "Well, we're all in the same boat here."

In about five minutes Mr. Toboggan came to me and asked me for the tractor starter. I gave it to him and he looked at it as if he'd seen five thousand of the things before. He probably had. "Well," he said, "let's see if my guess is right..." And off he walked with it. He already had a good idea what it had been doing, why it failed, and how to repair it. And he'd never seen that particular starter before in his life. He went to a cluttered nearby bench and began
unscrewing screws and banging the old housing apart with a hammer. This was not what surprised me. What DID surprise me was that he was going to fix the bloody thing while I waited!

The door opened and a very old man walked in. He had a big chew of tobacco in his mouth. Mike and I nodded at him, as did the married farm couple. The two men working in the shop called him by name and said hi, then turned their backs and returned to work. The old man made his way in between us customers and directly to an old chair set in a clearing in the mountain of fading boxes and crates, a chair that was directly under the clanking heater. He sat down heavily and reached under the chair for a coffee can and spat into it. He never spoke a
single word the whole time I was there. You find old folks like that out here. They're retired, probably living on a shoestring, and they have nowhere else to go and no other way to spend their days. So he came to the shop, made himself as comfortable as possible, and just sat there watching that tiny part of the world come and go. He'd probably been doing the same thing every day for years.

Mr. Coveralls hooked up some kind of old metal gizmo to two electrical leads and flipped a switch. Whatever motor that was contained therein hummed softly and evenly. He muttered, "Hmm. Well, 'bout damned time..."

He wrote a simple receipt out for the couple who had been waiting with us. The man paid him, everyone gave their small talk farewells (save for the old man, who remained silent but nodded at the couple) and they went out the door with their repaired...whatever...in the husband's hands.

I returned my attention to Mr. Toboggan, who was cheerfully scattering my starter all over the bench. He looked in this hole, poked something in that one, give a stout whack to another portion with his ever-present hammer, and try as I might I could not follow what he was doing or how he intended to fix the thing. While he was working, I conversationally brought up the fact that it had been a six volt system originally, but in 1997 I had it converted to a twelve volt
system. When I saw the bill from that shop, there was no mention of a new starter. The mechanic at that time explained to me that old Ford starters were built so strongly they'd run on damn near any DC power you threw into them. Doubling the voltage to twelve volts would hardly even be noticed by the device, save for the fact that it would turn a little faster.  Mr. Toboggan said yeah, everybody did that eventually. (Obviously this was no news to him.) He was working with his back to me while I was still stuffed  against the wall on the old metal stool. He said, "That ain't what's wrong with this thing. I ain't seen but maybe three, four Ford starters go bad from this series of tractors. I wish everything was built like them."

Mr. Coveralls, now working on another item, grunted agreement. "No, your actual starter motor is fine. Whatcha done here is you blew your  Bendix. They're always the first thing to go anyway." (A "Bendix" is a device that mounts to the very end of your starter shaft which engages the flywheel and turns the engine, then retracts quickly once the engine begins running.) He began rummaging through countless boxes, looking for the right part I needed. I
thought this could take all week, but soon I saw him concentrating in a very small area. He pulled out a dusty and faded old box, but the part it contained shined in the light when he opened it. A brand new part...except it was probably twenty or thirty years old. He held it up to the original, turned both in his hands, and then began banging it onto the shaft with his trusty hammer.

The old man, still silent, spat in the coffee can again and unzipped his coat.

Save for the old man, we all made small talk. Apparently they were hit hard by the early summer flooding, the flooding the National Weather Service referred to at the time as a "500 year storm". The water never got into the building, which both men considered a miracle. "Can you see us trying to move all this stuff?" We all laughed. It would have been impossible.

His hammering and pounding done, Mr. Toboggan took my starter and began running screws and bolts back into it with an air tool. Ziiiip! Ziiiip! Zzzzziiiiiiip! Then he took it and wandered off out of sight. I heard him mounting it to some kind of home made test stand and he threw the switch. The starter sounded normal, as it had sounded for the past several decades since my father bought the tractor, used, at a farm sale when I was thirteen years old. Presently he
reappeared and held the starter out for me to look at.

"Pay attention here, willya? See this part here? (He pointed to a portion of the Bendix, still shining and new.) "Well, if you turn it like THIS (he turned it),  this will run down the shaft and lock. Then you'll need to bring it back and have me fix it. So don't turn it. Understand?"

I said I did. He left and replaced that portion of the starter where it belonged, and then brought it back and handed it to me. "Wellsir, you're done!" We'd been there about thirty to thirty five minutes.

He shoved a mound of papers around on what was probably their "business desk" and came up with a receipt, scribbled on it, and handed it to me. The charge was $68.25, less than half of the cost of the very cheapest rebuilt starter I could find anywhere on the Internet. I paid the man and thanked him, he gave me my change and warned me again not to monkey with that starter until it was reinstalled in the tractor, and I asked if they had any business cards. This was
such good service I wanted to be able to contact them again should anything else  break around here that I can't fix on my own. The two mechanics looked at each other. "Cards...cards...used to have some..."
Mr. Coveralls reached into a box and said, "Here ya go! These ought to do you!"
They were little sticky-backed calendars, the kind businesses hand out everywhere. He picked one up, looked at it, and dug around in the box again pulling out a second one. He handed both to me. "Don't know if your wife will knock you in the head or not, so I'll give you one of each and let you decide which to put up."

When he handed the small calendars to me I looked and saw every month on one of them had a pleasant rural scene, a pretty photograph taken during that season of the month. The other one had a pretty girl, topless and alluring, for every month. Both men laughed. I told them, "I'll give the one with the scenery to my wife. I'll be keeping this one for myself." They laughed again.

As Mike and I left, we noticed the mysterious dog was still there, across the road and sound asleep in the former yard of whatever building that was once atop the ancient foundation. He offered no trouble. Neither did we. We hopped in the truck and drove away.

I came home and reinstalled the starter and new Bendix. I climbed atop the tractor, turned on the key, and hit the starter button. The tractor was running before it made one full revolution, I think. The thing works wonderfully.

In earlier years, before Wal-Mart, Circuit City, the big box stores, and even supermarkets, the United States had scores of thousands of places like I'd just been. Now they're few and far between. But my advice is to seek them out and treasure them. They will all be gone in just a few years. In the meantime, if you don't get dog bit or forget to pay attention when the mechanic tells you something important, they can be sound places to save money and time. And they are an absolute treat to visit.