Word: repairmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Thousands of housewives complained bitterly that their 1955-57 model washers and washer-dryers needed six or seven annoying and costly repair calls a year (v. a national average of two or three), and Hotpoint repairmen discovered faulty clutches, transmissions and filters in alarming numbers. To save its reputation and future sales, the company decided to do the only honorable thing: repair and replace some 40,000 ailing machines that had brought complaints from owners. Last week Hotpoint's 11,000 appliance dealers were busy doing just that-at a cost that the industry estimates will be somewhere between...
High Tension. In Hatboro, Pa., Ralph Kufen returned from a trip to an electrical repairmen's convention after hearing that his house had caught fire because of faulty wiring...
...Abraham Gilbert, onetime vice president of a local of a repairmen and electrical workers union, said that coin-machine employees make "very good wages" and need no union. Actually, said he, the operators' association needed the union to scare competitors away with picketing. For that reason the association paid dues and union expenses...
...must deal with subscribers who blow apart their telephone lines by firing shotguns out the window (148 such cases in Chicago last New Year's Eve), with farmers who harvest the lines with their crops (corn-picking time is a nightmare for repairmen), with homeowners who are jealous of their picture-window view ("They come at me like a bear," says one foreman, "if they don't like where I put a pole"). He must also be ready for the occasional lonely housewife who meets him in a negligee. Rule of thumb: get out, and come back when...
...Beat Generation bop-talker who tries to soft-sell Jordan on a cool love affair. There is a native Neanderthal man who tries to pin Jordan to the floorboards of the half-built ginmill in which he hopes to mulct the summer trade. There are assorted homosexuals, spivish repairmen and alcoholics-unanimous from TV, ad alley and publishers' row. The crisis on which the plot slowly turns is whether the Neanderthal man will complete his ginmill to the ruin of the summer dwellers' dunes. Author Waller neatly wrings a lemon twist of satire from the hectic meeting...