Bob’s Appliance Repair Company

This posting is not about Bob my neighbor. It is a story about a different Bob.

Bob of Bob’s repair service was an old man who looked to be in his mid 80s. But I think he was in his mid 70s. I think when our regular repair man killed himself we looked in the yellow pages under appliance repairs and found Bob’s Appliance Repair Company.

For over a ten year span we dealt with Bob. He was good, reliable, and above all, reasonable. We liked his services so much we sent him to my mother-in-law and our son Adam to do appliance repair when they had problems.

Bob was hyper for an old guy. He always had to be busy. Once, we had him here to look for a look for a natural gas leak of our furnace in the basement that we thought we smelled. He made all kinds of tests and decided the gas smell was seeping from a opened sack of fertilizer I had there. Then, he spotted our push lawnmower, blower, and weed eater – all gasoline powered. He demanded I take them out right then and leave them out. He said things like that blow up houses everyday. Luckily, we have an opened space under our den addition.

Last year Bob was here doing something, I forgot what, and while he worked I stood nearby and we talked. We talked about our children which somehow led into his life story.

He was born in north Georgia. When he was about 16 he quit school. He and a friend hitchhiked to his sister and brother-in-law’s farm in Texas. There they did farm labor and he and his sister fought like cat and dogs. He and his brother-in-law got alone fine but he and his sister didn’t. Finally, he got mad enough that he and his friend left. While on the road hitchhiking in Texas they came upon a big farm of some sort. They asked the head of it for a job and for a year they worked in the grain warehouse. They also slept in the warehouse because they did not have enough money to pay out for a room. They worked ten or twelve hours a day. After so many weeks of that, the seasons changed and they were out of work. With no job, food, or a place to stay, they joined the Army. He fought in Korea.

After he got out of the service he came to the boomtown he heard about Marietta, Georgia. He got a job with Lockheed and worked there until he retired. He married a local girl, which by last report was living with a man on a houseboat on the west coast and she is thinking about leaving him. I wonder if she ever did.

Bob had three acres of land he had since land was cheap in Marietta.

When Bob left I discovered Bob left a pair of pliers. I decided someday when I was in the area of his shop in downtown Marietta I would call him to make sure he was there and drop them by there.

Before my returning the pliers happened I read in the obituaries that Bob had died.

That was strange that he decided to tell me a brief of his life story within a month before he died.