Tales from the Plumbing Shop

 

In May of 1953, Vake and Milly rolled into town, Florence, OR, to open their plumbing business.  They arrived with their belongings packed in the 1949 Dodge pick-up truck, with two daughters and one housecat. Vake was 39 years old and Milly was 31. They would work the business until they retired in 1981, when Vake was 67 years old, Milly was 59,they had 4 kids,  and by then, they knew everybody in town. In fact, when zip codes were introduced in 1963, Milly’s father sent a letter from Florida addressed to “The Plumber 97439” and it reached Vake.

      Shortly after we arrived, a little neighbor boy, Pete Harp, told Sandy, “Plumbers dig in shit.” Milly retorted, “No they don’t, they hire an Oakie to do it.” Pete’s grandfather, the next door neighbor, was from Oklahoma.  That evening he knocked on the door with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses in hand, and he and Vake never had a problem. (There was an evening when Milly consoled Mrs. Lyday while the police dealt with her husband and a pistol, but just like you see on “Cops,” he passed out before any damages occurred. Basically, they were quiet, good-natured neighbors who didn’t protest when we kids used their utility trailer as a teeter-totter, or fed dandelions to their chickens. Chickens go wild for dandelions.)

     Salesmen from the plumbing supply companies called regularly at the plumbing shop.  Chiefly among them, Vake did business with Harry Holden, a slim, dapper, white-haired man, always dressed in a suit and tie, and who always drove a Cadillac. He may have been a salesman since horse and buggy days, but I can be only 85% sure that Vake told me that.  Other salesmen called less frequently, and Vake didn’t remember their names, but he tagged them:  The one with the perpetual big phony grin was “Laughing Boy,” and the one who was a bit messy was “Gravy Stains.”

      Sometimes Harry Holden’s wife Mazie came along on sales calls. During one of their calls, Milly noticed that Mazie had an ugly dark age spot on one wrist. Milly believed that you could get rid of somebody’s warts by buying them—handing them a coin and saying “It’s mine now; it will go away.” She wasn’t sure that Mazie’s growth was a wart, but she offered to buy it anyway—and it went away!

      The freight man who served the plumbing shop was Bruce Jones. His son Larry was a year or so behind me in high school.  Larry had  jacked up the rear end of his car just for looks. The story was that he convinced his mother that the car ran more efficiently that way, because it was always rolling down hill.

     The Plumber got called upon for a lot more than stopped drains and leaky pipes. Mrs. McCormick dropped her dentures in the toilet.  Vake could reach in and feel them resting in the drain, but his hand was too large to grip them and retrieve them. “I just told her to reach in there with her long skinny arm,” he said, and she did.

     When Vake called on Truman Smith at his farm up the North Fork of the Siuslaw, he "Looked like the wrath of God.”  He had taken antibiotics in anticipation of having his teeth pulled. He invited Vake in for coffee, but as soon as he took a sip himself, his mouth started to swell. He was having an allergic reaction, so Vake loaded him into his car and rushed him to the hospital, where he was confined for a week. (There were no aid cars, paramedics, or EMTs in the 1950s.)

     Hale Kilmer lived on Mercer Lake, where he took a plunge into the lake to swim every morning.  Once when Vake’s journeyman plumber, Bob Stewart, was on his hands and knees inspecting under a sink for Kilmer, the customer asked him, for no known reason, “How would you like a kick in the ass?” After that, he was always called “Kick-in-the-Ass Kilmer.”

     One of Vake’s early customers  was a man who went by the name of “Mr. Barkley.”  He played the piano beautifully, especially Chopin. Years later, Vake heard that “Barkley” was the name of his wife, who had been his secretary.  He was supposed to be a federal judge retired out of Illinois whose true name was Moriadyke, or something like that. And the stories were that he was living under an assumed name, either because of a former acrimonious divorce, or because of a possible mob hit aimed at him.

     But perhaps Vake’s oddest call for a plumbing need came from Leavitt Wright, who was a professor of one of the humanities at the University of Oregon in Eugene.  Professor Wright had a summer home near Woahink Lake, and he called Vake because there was a rat swimming around in his toilet.  He had tried to kill it with Draino, and Vake told him he was probably just torturing the poor thing. Professor Wright didn’t have a shovel, so Vake drove to his house, fished the rat out of the toilet with a shovel, and put it out of its misery.

     Vake sold Rheem water heaters. Their slogan was “Pressure proved water heaters.” Our bicycles had decals that said “Pressure Proved Water Heaters.”  When Sandy took her bicycle to college, somebody stole it, but she found it later, in a bike rack outside of a dormitory, and she retrieved it.  There was no mistaking it. “Pressure Proved Water Heaters.”

     To my distress, I have been unable to find any photos of the folk’s shop or company trucks. Thus,I will try to illustrate  this essay with the Rheem logo.

     P.S. Vake and Milly attended an annual Rheem convention. Milly was asked to draw the winning name for the door prize.  Two years in a row, she chose her own name. People didn’t believe it.  One prize was the movie camera (without sound) that Vake used to document the family picnics of the 1950s.