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The whole experience was so frustrating, so painful that even today Robert Lindsey, 46, cannot talk about his trouble calmly. "Five months ago," says Lindsey, who works as a short-order cook on Los Angeles' industrial East Side, "I called a repairman to fix my 21-in. TV set." The repairman took one look and said the tuner was broken, a minor matter of $20 or $25. He produced a blank "authorization" for repairs for Lindsey to sign. "So I signed it."
For the next two months, TV Fan Lindsey struggled vainly to get his set back. No sooner was the tuner reported cured than the repairman said he needed a new picture tube—$60 more. That took another four weeks. Eventually the set came back—only to break down soon after. "The tuner again?" groaned Lindsey. "Yup," said the repairman, and bundled it off for another month. The final bill, including "delivery": $162.40. Says Lindsey, with the dazed air of a man who had unwittingly picked up a live wire: "They really gimme the works. And the worst of it is my set don't work no better than when this here run-around began."
Mr. Fixit. "This here runaround" is a phrase instantly recognizable to hundreds of thousands of frustrated U.S. householders—and so is the "they." "They," in the moment of supreme exasperation that coincides with the collapse of an electric dryer on washday, is the apparently easy going, unhurried individual who is striving manfully to maintain the plumbing in the nation's 28 million homes, the wrench-wielding mechanic who administers to the health of the nation's 50 million autos, its 15 million power lawnmowers, its 375 million electric appliances. "They" is the U.S. Repairman in all his disguises—the familiar Mr. Fixit of fact and financial friction, the man everyone knows—assiduously courted, ardently denounced, universally accepted as the indispensable man of the gadget-ridden American home.
The U.S. repairman has long since won a special niche in American folklore. Depending on the circumstances, he ranks midway between the riverboat cardsharp and the village idiot, part freebooting buccaneer and part plain boob; or he appears, armed with screwdriver and flashlight, as a latter-day St. George riding heroically against the dragons that infest the nation's drain traps and fuse boxes. In commuter cars, at cocktail parties and women's clubs, he is the center of a game of "Can you top this?"—an endless recital of domestic triumphs and defeats. The plumber who forgets his tools is legendary; now, says one pained Washington housewife with murder on her mind, "he just rides around in that white Thunderbird and never even comes." The counterplay comes from the housewife who has discovered a reliable Mr. Fixit, a possession as chic today as the little dressmaker who could copy the latest Paris fashions. Whether villain or hero, the repairman is indispensable; he dominates a vast area of dripping faucets, faulty percolators and a host of unanswered telephone calls for help—and all because the moneyed U.S. public has made him so.