I was just out of high school in 1958, when I got a job working in a TV repair shop. The name of the place was Clearfield Electric, and we did more than fix TV’s and radios. The bosses name was Roy Flippen. My co-workers were Don Farrel and LeRoy Waggoner. We got just about everything that was electrical.
TV’s and radios of that day were mostly made with vacuum tubes, and they were far and away the component that failed in whatever device they were used in. Transistors and diodes were around, but not universal. It was possible to know a little about what made a television set work, and to use that knowledge to fix most of the vacuum tube problems one encountered. Later on I would hear people who went around at night replacing tubes in TV’s referred to as ‘Night Crawlers’. That’s what I was.
I had a little electronics in high school, and I took the job to gain experience and a little knowledge, but I learned a lot that had nothing to do with electronics. Going out to people’s houses to work on their appliances brought me into contact with them, as well as the devices I came to fix. I saw them in ways that others did not. I sometimes saw things that they might have preferred to have kept hidden.
Except for the guys who worked in the shop with me, the names have been changed to protect the privacy and dignity of those portrayed, whether or not they deserve such treatment.
