Word: repairmen
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...many a helpless housewife and hapless weekend handyman, life's most nagging little crisis is an encounter with a leaky roof, a broken window or a clogged drain. Professional repairmen are hard to find, harder to pay. The do-it-yourself books often produce only frayed tempers, flayed thumbs. Last week, from Los Angeles to Long Island, the unhandy were entrusting chores to a new and spreading U.S. service: the home-repair club...
...clubs supply homeowners with good repairmen around the clock, guarantee their work. When Hurricane Donna swept across Long Island's Nassau County last week, more than a thousand homeowners with flooded basements, leaking roofs and fallen trees put in urgent calls to Allied Homeowners' Association of Roslyn, one of the biggest and most bustling of the U.S. home-repair clubs. The crews of some 30 Allied contractors, from plumbers and tree surgeons to swimming-pool pumpers, went right to work. In recent weeks, Allied also supplied a cotton candymaker for a children's party, searched...
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...
...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...