Powering the fix-it revolution

Retired from a career in automotive and machine repair, Fred Rossi, 75, is a tinker through and through. He has volunteered at every Warwick Repair Café since it launched a decade ago, doing whatever needs doing: first electrical repair, then woodworking, and now he mans the knife and tools sharpening station.

Volunteering is a way of life for Rossi, who spent 30 years as a volunteer firefighter in Spring Valley, NY.

“One smiling little girl makes it all worthwhile,” said Rossi. “You come home, you’re exhausted, you’re all talked out. You can’t talk anymore, your mouth is dry, but you’re happy.”

Where did you pick up these skills?

My uncles and aunts, they’re all do-it-yourselfers, they all had different kinds of jobs. And the kids, we were unpaid helpers. That’s how I started learning this, that and the other thing. If one of ‘em was a carpenter, during a school break, I didn’t go to Florida; I was building, or plumbing, or whatever we had to be doing.

Does any particular repair stand out in your memory?

One time, a lady came in and she had a doll that she had when she was young, and the doll would talk when you squeezed it. That was her doll, and if she felt lonely or whatever, you know, she squeezed the doll and it made her feel good. She wanted to give it to her daughter, but it wasn’t talking. So I said to her, “Look, I don’t know what’s on the inside. There’s no way to access it. There’s no zipper on the back, you know.” You don’t know what you’re going to get involved with a lot of times, and you don’t have a lot of time, you don’t have the things you need, there might be a switch or something. So I said, “I don’t know what I’m up against, but the only way I can find out is if we open up the back of the doll, which means cut the fabric. And then I don’t even know if I could fix it, until I see what’s going on.”

She said to me, “Well, if you can’t fix it, it’s just another doll. So give it a try.”

So I went to the seamstresses, and I said, “If we open this thing up, can you put it back together?” And they said yes. So we did. We opened it up, and I found out what was wrong. Really, it just needed a battery, and it started talking. So she brought it back over to the seamstresses, and they put it back together.

Then a couple sessions after that, that lady came in. Now I’m over in the sharpening department, so I’m a little further away, and she was standing there. She was pointing at something, so I figured she brought something else to be repaired, and so I gave her two thumbs up from across the room, and she shook her head and she pointed down again. So I stood up and I looked, and her daughter was there holding the doll.

Do you remember what the doll said?

I know what it said, but I’m not going to say it.

Why not?

I’ll cry. Already I’m teary.

That’s ok. I probably will too.

It said, “I love you” [chokes up].

That’s a beautiful story.

We can go on and on, but you know, it’s what it’s all about. Repair Cafe is more than just repairs. It’s a social get-together. It’s helping people. And volunteers – you know, no matter what you volunteer for, we’re special people. I don’t care if you fly down to Puerto Rico after a hurricane and help them rebuild, or what. We all walk out of there with no more money in our pocket than when we walked in, but we all come back with some kind of satisfaction. Everybody has a reason to become a volunteer. With me, it’s just that I have this expertise that I like to share and I like to help people.

You mentioned that you taught knife-sharpening skills to a teenager who’d come into the Café. How did that come about?

Well, his grandmother came in with him, and I was sharpening her knives, and he was looking at me, and really attentive. You know, people look and they talk and we explain what we’re doing all the time, but he was really intent on what I was doing, so I said to him, “You can sit over here.” We encourage people to do things themselves. That’s part of it too, is teaching people what we know. So he sat next to me, and he watched what I was doing, and I said, “Do you want to try it? And he said, “Okay.”

So he took the knife and I showed him what to do, and he did a little bit, and basically that was it. So at the next Repair Cafe, his grandmother came back with him and she said, “Would it be okay if he sat next to you and you could show him how to do this?”

So I said, “Well, the thing is, I really don’t have the time to demonstrate. And there’s a lot more to it than than just running a piece of metal over a stone and making it sharp.” I said, “If you want, you can bring him to my condominium, and I’ll do one-on-one sessions with him, if he’s that interested. Come to find out that he was on a very high level of autism. He was, you know, just reserved because he was autistic, and you know how kids can be at that age. But now, after I taught him that, his grandmother said he he turned around, his self-esteem raised up, and he was proud. And what happened was his neighbor’s a hunter, so he sharpened his neighbor’s knives, and his neighbor liked the way they turned out, so he knows people in New York City that come up here and go hunting, so they offered to pay him to sharpen their knives

That’s awesome.

So that’s how we branch out. We’re not just stuck in that building. The seamstresses have had seminars at the local libraries where they teach people how to make handbags. So these are all part of the Cafe.

How many times did the teenager come here to your place?

Twice. But it was for about three hours each time.

So what’s the Repair Café’s success rate? How often are you able to fix the broken items people bring in?

Our repair rate is very high. I would say probably 80% get done that day, and then probably another five or 10% on top of that [get done down the road]. Where we fall short is when we don’t have what we need to put something back together.

What’s happening now too is that more and more Cafés are opening. So rather than saying, because in Warwick it’s every other month, you can say, “Well look there’s going to be a Repair Café in Monroe in two weeks if you want bring it back to that Repair Café, see me and I’ll finish it there.”

Wait – you also go to the Monroe Repair Café?

I go to Monroe. I go to Woodbury and Chester.

Wow.

And there’s another one opening up now in in Vernon, which I might get involved with because my brother lives over there. A lot of us do multiple Repair Cafés, yeah.

Well Warwick was the first one in Orange County. So now what happens is one opened up in Chester, and they’re looking for volunteers. So until they get their group with their own volunteers, a lot of us will go over there and help them get started. Some of us will stay, some of us won’t. You know, I’m kind of settled in, and being retired, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands, so I’ll do them.

Why are these skills important to pass along?

We’ve become a throwaway society. You know, you buy something that doesn’t work and throw it away, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not fixable or not good. And people just don’t care about fixing things anymore. They’d rather just go out and buy a new phone because it’s a different color, or you know, it can do one more function than the last one. So they take a perfectly good phone, throw it in the garbage, and buy a new one. And they’re not taking the time to learn these other skills. So, if I can teach somebody anything that I know – it’s like not a legacy. It’s just satisfaction, saying, “Well, one more person that can do something in the future, like sharpen knives.”

I would say that is a legacy.

Yeah, I guess in a roundabout way. I mean, you know, not like Dolly Parton, but in my own little way.

How does it feel to have had a hand in starting the first Repair Café in Orange County, and seeing them spread?

Good, because now I see that more people really do have an interest in being sustainable. To see people coming in and thanking us – Gee, I really like this, but I had no place to get it fixed, or it was too expensive. And then watching it expand from when I first went, when there were maybe 10 volunteers, to now 20 to 30, and from one Repair Cafe to six or seven in the area. Besides what I’m involved in, there’s also one up in Port Jervis, and there’s one in Middletown. Watching the whole thing expand, it’s like, we’re not going to solve the world’s problems by the repairs that we do, but we do make an impact in our community. And if it’s only one percent, that’s still more than it was before.