Thanks Charlie

To The Swarthmorean,

When we moved into our current Swarthmore home in 1980, it was already 77 years old. It had an endless supply of small projects to keep us busy. It also had eight bedrooms—room for all eight of us.

Owners of old houses will recognize typical odd jobs that need doing to keep things afloat—to name a few: the third floor toilet ran and needed a new gizmo, no longer manufactured; the windows in the master bedroom were disconnected from the cloths-line sash cords, which had rotted, and copper chain was needed, along with a special doohickey tool to get at the sash weights without ruining the wood window trim; a tiny springlike doodad in three door latches snapped, the doors wouldn’t stay shut, one of them was to a bathroom, and they likely needed replacement by someone who wore a monocle and billed by the hour; and the main staircase treads squeak like mice, and required cast nail-like screws that have not been manufactured since 1939.  

We couldn’t afford to pay people to handle these randomly recurrent assignments—after all, we’d spent all our money on the house; and our initial mortgage rate was 12%. Enter Swarthmore Hardware—stage right. Charlie not only had all the stuff I ever needed, he was always able to explain to me how to use it. He’s never let me down, never sent me to a big box store. Some of the things I needed were extremely inexpensive. The three springs for door latches were 49 cents each and one of the toilet parts turned out to be a 50 cent rubber gasket. Charlie has helped us to be able to live in this house.

When I retired—a shameful number of years ago—we decided that the yard would now be done in-house; and over time we acquired a monster snow blower, and quiet battery-powered yard tools: a lawnmower, a blower, a weed-whacker and a hedge trimmer. No more electric cords for us. We purchased all this stuff from Charlie, and I noted that all the battery-powered equipment was sold by him at the same prices quoted elsewhere. Apparently the manufacturer did not want to accommodate Amazon, Home Depot, or Lowe’s over the local hardware store.

It’s rare that the exact tool is at hand when needed, but the mower, blower, weed-wacker and hedge trimmer were exactly what I needed: cut the grass, edge and whack away, blow grass and leaves, and trim the hedge. The only problem was that if I did all that at once, the single battery needed recharging before I finished. At just about the time I needed more battery power, the single battery began acting peculiarly, and it needed charging more often. I took it to Charlie who promised to obtain a replacement.  In the meantime, I bought a second battery, since I wanted two anyway. After more than a month of waiting, Charlie declared that the replacement battery was not on hand, that it was probably on a ship somewhere and that he wanted to give me a new battery now, and would keep the replacement when and if it ever arrived. No paperwork involved.

So now we’ve got our two batteries, are back in business, and I ponder the Byzantine administrative red tape that would have been necessary to accomplish this back-and-forth procedure anywhere but here in Swarthmore. Thanks Charlie.

Hugh MacMullan
Swarthmore