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Meet Teddy Ruiz, who came in the back door to borrow a vice and never went home
The last of seven. Teddy sweeps up, fixes bikes out the back, and says try it and see before anybody has finished asking. Nothing happening is his favourite part, because nothing happening means something is loose.
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Meet June Marchetti, who minds the front table on Saturday mornings
Part six of seven. Sal's daughter grew up in the back of the shop watching the little kids' table, and then one Saturday her father pulled a stool over. She is the one who will let a six-year-old hold a part.
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Meet Nate Pruitt, which is me, so I asked myself the same six questions
Part five of seven. I write these posts, so this week I wrote the questions down and answered them at my own kitchen table. A two-transistor blinker at nine, forty years of not looking, and a Saturday morning I handed the lid to somebody else.
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Meet Vera Holcomb, who pushed four desks together and got a club out of it
Part four of seven. Two pupils stayed behind in 1978 to ask why the lamp got hot enough to burn a finger. She had no budget and no period to answer in, so she bought a kit with her own money and made a room.
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Meet Emmett Crane, who ran the Bijou on weeknights and the creature feature on Fridays
Part three of seven. A projectionist who stayed for the wiring rather than the films, a cape, two coffins, a fog machine that was really a kettle, and the night the prop on the set turned out to be plugged in.
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Meet Sal Marchetti, who has been behind the same counter since the shop opened
Part two of seven. Sal answered a card in the window, arrived knowing none of it, and taught himself out of the first booklet — which is still under the counter, and which he will still hand you before he hands you an opinion.
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Meet Ray Kessler, who fixed televisions here for thirty-one years
The first of seven interviews with the people of Ohmsville. Ray came out of the shop at nine with a box he could not carry, stayed for three decades of picture tubes and tape machines, and still has the manual with his pencil marks on project forty-one.