Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness throughout the world.

Special Treat – David Wainland

March 31, 2007

IF I CAN’T FIX IT

By David Wainland

Email David@DAvidWainland.com

            During the war, our Bronx apartment had all the amenities of the modern world, a party-line telephone, Tremont 8-5283, a radio and a semi-working fridge. Actually the fridge never worked, at least from late 1943 to the end of the conflict. Since Frigidaire, like every other major manufacturer, had gone to war and was now building planes or battleships, parts were impossible to get. So, my father gutted the monster and left the round perforated cooling instrument on the top as a symbol of futility.

Every morning, a man dressed in a leather apron and heavy matching gloves carried a block of ice up the two flights and waited while my mother emptied the drip pan. In the winter, a cold-box on the fire escape served as an additional cooling source.

We had an old radio and each night, atmospherics permitting, after I went to bed and the blackout shades drawn, mom and dad would sit transfixed in the kitchen and listen to war news. If the phone rang, they very likely would not answer it, family and friends knew that, so if the bell clanged with our personal ring, it had to be an emergency.

Parked and languishing most of the time for lack of gas, was the family car. You purchased fuel with a ration stamp and extra stamps were hard to come by unless you dealt in the black-market. Dad did not do the market, though somehow he always managed an extra gallon or two.

I cannot remember the make or model, but I do know they built it many years before the war. With a little slight of hand, despite the lack of parts, dad managed to keep it running. I also remember that it had a wonderful modern convenience called a rumble seat that they never let me use. Instead, dad installed a toy steering wheel in the front so I could play at driving while seated between my mother and him.

One day, dad stepped hard on the brakes and I pitched forward into the dash. I spent the next few years missing my front upper tooth. Every picture taken during that era shows me with the same silly toothless smile. They never sat me in the front again.

After the war, when personal goods began to return to the free market, dad bought a surplus army ambulance for his junk business. With the red crosses still blatantly painted on the sides and siren screaming, he would tear through the streets, speed at will and park at his pleasure. That all ended on a business day trip to the mountains when a state policeman stopped him and he spent the night in a Monticello jail. 

The cross and the siren disappeared the next day.

One Sunday morning he drove us, mom, my brother Jerry, me and some of our neighbors to a picnic in Yonkers. On the trip up, two of the tires went flat and on the return trip, two more. My parents and their friends never faltered. Amidst riotous laughter, a roadside meal served on old army blankets, pop patched the flats and completed the journey.  

That was my father, he fixed broken things and never let them get in his way.  

Dad was a master tinker. Other people’s castoffs were his pleasures. I guess that is why he so loved the junk and later the antiques business. He would find them, fix them and flaunt them.

“If I can’t fix it, I’ll fix it so no one can fix it,” his oft repeated motto.

In January of 1949, he found something he could not immediately fix.

While loading a truck he slipped on the icy tailgate and fell to the street shattering his hip.

They operated, operated again and operated once more. For the next three years, during the times between surgery and therapy he tried working while on crutches. Nothing he attempted went well. We soon slipped past broke and into poverty, but he never stopped trying.  

Then in 1951, he borrowed fifty dollars from his older brother, Harry and in the basement of Harry’s auction gallery, he began a new business. With a cane in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, he began building one of the largest antique and chandelier restoration business in the country.

Three years later, in January of 1954, we hung up Tremont-8 for the last time and he moved us to the affluent community of Woodmere, Long Island.

A new home a new beginning and a celebration of his motto.

“If I can’t fix it.