Word: handyman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Waldeck was raised in Philadelphia in a family that liked to have music playing. Nicknamed "Tinker," he started with the drums ("I was pounding out rhythms before I could sit up") and learned guitar at 14. His father was a handyman and, in Waldeck's view, a true environmentalist. A handyman is the ultimate recycler, he says, who knows how to fix things rather than throw them away...
...left field there's just no way you can see it coming, but I can't apologize for that." Nor, given the artful conclusion, should he. Stolen Kiss moves up the coastline a bit to Rehobeth, where a longtime Washington bureaucrat now works as a year-round handyman and lives apart from his wife of 39 years. "Thank God," he muses, "for letting us be apart and at peace with the loneliness," although his serenity proves more fragile than he wants to believe...
...have found an affordable apartment in Melrose Park. In their excitement to escape the squalor and fear of the ghetto, the Sleds gave little thought to what it might mean to be the first black family in their neighborhood. "This was like heaven," recalls Donald, a 44-year-old handyman who sometimes stutters when excited. "It was so quiet and peaceful." But the Sleds have found anything but peace in Melrose Park. Instead, their new home has been under siege. Vandals have taunted them with racial slurs. They have shattered their windows, punctured their tires, torched their car and driven...
...electrical wires snake along bare walls, a door opens to a reeking kitchen dominated by a blackened stove. At $300 a month it is, alas, almost a bargain. "Nothing is affordable," says Gonzales, 42, whose daughter is on welfare and whose son-in-law lost his job as a handyman. "We had to settle for this...
...local housing authority has purchased 121 foreclosed houses for an average of $37,000 apiece, and is renting them to low-income tenants for as little as $231 a month. Skeptics have been won over by its tight standards: renters must take an 18-hour handyman's training course so they can keep up the houses...