The Appliance Guy

We lost a very good friend and trusted appliance repair guy last winter. Leland Powell has been coming to this house for 35 years to fix anything that could be plugged in. Lea was never sick a day in his life until he turned 80. Then he went into the hospital last winter and didn’t really come out again.

Lea was raised on a small farm in Nova Scotia, in a family of seven children. He told me that until he was 12 years old he thought his name was “Get Wood.” He tried a career in banking, which brought him and his wife Myrt to this neighbourhood in 1971, but he soon switched to appliance repair after taking a course in electronics. His grey van became a sight as familiar as the mailman, and probably more welcome.

A man of very few words and a pocketful of dog treats, he was the only person who could walk into my house without making the dogs bark. His understanding of kitchen appliances was encyclopedic. Unfortunately, as the years went by, the quality of those machines dropped alarmingly. As each company failed, its parts inventory was transferred through a succession of larger companies and hedge funds until the only representative for my 30-year-old high-end convection oven was a scary-looking guy living in a house trailer somewhere in New Mexico.

Lea’s van looked like the set for the musical Cats. But he knew where everything was. And if the part you were looking for wasn’t in the van, he knew the closest and cheapest place to get it. One time, I was trying to splice together the broken door support spring on my 1995 Miele dishwasher. A replacement spring cost $200 and would be six weeks coming from Germany. No weld or clamp I invented would hold the old one together so I went around to Lea’s house to consult the oracle.

“Come in,” he said. “I think I have what you need right here.” 

“What? You have that spring in your van?”

“No. I have the same dishwasher you do and it’s off to the dump at the end of the week. We’ll take the springs out of it.” 

At various times, I seriously considered giving up this writing profession and learning the appliance repair trade from him but Lea was doubtful. “It’s not a great living,” he confided. I’m sure it wasn’t given his willingness to be paid in books and theatre tickets. But I learned enough from him to build my own repair satchel with a multimeter, flashlight, kneepads and many of the same tools he carried. I became so adept at my own repairs that for the last five years or so, Lea just came to the house to collect eggs from my henhouse and chickens from my freezer. 

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A couple of weeks before he died, I found him in his hospital room looking at the back of his heart monitor machine, which apparently needed a fuse. At the same time, he had a phone in his ear and was coaching a woman through a washing machine repair.

His memorial at the Legion was full of people like me, all wondering how we would function in a world without his talents. At the sandwich buffet following the service I heard snippets of conversations that alternated between the recall of Lea’s pithy observations about machines (“they’re all crap now!”) and the lament that we would not see his like again. 

Just a few weeks ago my wife’s beloved 30-year-old Dacor cooktop conked out. Two appliance guys and a wholesale parts depot in the city pronounced the cooktop unrepairable. All my searches on the internet for a 240P infinite switch turned up the same reply: “no results found.” Not even in New Mexico. The new cooktops my wife found on her iPad were worth more than my truck. But after rooting around in the shed at the back of Lea’s garden, Myrt and I found that 240P switch and I managed to restore the cooktop to life. 

It’s a great thing when you can get your wife to laugh at your jokes after 38 years. It’s an even greater achievement to have her come home and find a pot sizzling merrily on a loved appliance she thought was destined for the dump. 

I think Lea would be proud of me.