Word: repairable
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...consumer complaints, which are climbing almost as rapidly as the wages of carpenters, plumbers, glaziers and electricians. Typically, the Chicago Better Business Bureau last year counted 2,178 protests against the performance of home remodelers, substantially more than the number of gripes registered against the runner-up, the auto-repair business. Home repair is characterized by maddening delays, shoddy workmanship and startling expense...
...Their Mercy. Complaining consumers are the victims of a classic economy of scarcity, which enables contractors and repairmen to charge what they please and get away with it. The need for their services is enormous because few homeowners can perform any complex repair jobs themselves. Construction unions make sure that wages stay high by keeping the supply of craftsmen inadequate to meet the demand In the Oakland, Calif , area, the number of union plumbers, currently 900, is actually shrinking because the union is training only ten apprentices this year. Anachronistic spread-the-work rules prevent the most efficient...
...owns three trucks, employs eight workers and farms out work to subcontractors. Vincent Bardis, 40, a former salesman, has built a bigger Chicago business by coordinating the work of 36 subcontractors. His firm has booked $750,000 worth of business so far this year. For some other contractors, repair and remodeling work have served as the launching pad into house-construction. William Adkison and Ralph DeMeo, a couple of Florida carpenters who were earning $2.83 an hour a decade ago, joined to start A.D.H. Construction Co. The firm did extensive remodeling work, earned enough to begin building apartment houses...
Conflicting Versions. Each side blames the other for the latest trouble. According to the Soviet version, the Chinese had illegally infiltrated troops into the Russian area. Early one morning, as Soviet engineers landed from two river craft on their part of the island to repair navigation markers, Chinese ambushers opened fire with submachine guns and grenade launchers. The fusillade killed one Russian worker, wounded two and inflicted severe damage on the Blackbird and Turpan, the boats. The Russians, so they say, did not even shoot back...
Many readers miss the florid circumlocutions of such erotic classics as Fanny Hill or My Secret Life. Today's pornographer handles a love scene as if he were dictating an engine-repair manual for high school dropouts. Not so the oldtimers, whose swooning maidens entered the amatorial bout with timorous displays of budded rotundities, swelling hillocks, portals of ecstasy and other geographical purlieus quite foreign to Gray's Anatomy. When it comes to a seduction scenario, few contemporary eroticists could match the subtlety of an anonymous 17th-century poet in reciting a pastoral love-in between a fair...