| |
Published by Marin Independent Journal, 2003
Author Rick Polito
UP TO HIS elbows in wires, gears, tiny electric motors
and dusty plastic castle ramparts, Mark Manley is pulling
the
stake from Dracula's heart.
But this Dracula takes quarters.
"I think the problem with the paddles is in the circuit board,"Manley
says, leaning over a pinball machine with the undead count glaring
coolly from the painted glass backdrop.
Manley, a trained automotive mechanic, is spending less time crawling
under cars these days and more time rooting his way through the
clockwork bowels
of old Coke machines, dust-encrusted Wurlitzer jukeboxes, rusty
metal pedal cars and ailing pinball games like the Dracula model
he performed surgery on
last month. It's part of a business Manley's boss believes will
resurrect showrooms' worth of nostalgic mechanical icons now rusting
on multitudes of Marin back
porches.
"This county is rich with stuffed garages and stuffed back rooms,"says
budding nostalgia merchant Don Orlandi.
Old penny gum-ball machines, neon signs, heavy steel ice boxes.
Orlandi, owner of Orlandi Fender and Body in San Rafael, wants
to take the
expertise and equipment
he's accumulated in restoring old cars - his company built the
hot rods for "American
Graffiti" - and put it to work restoring the icons of his
youth.
He keeps one of those icons in his home. It's the soda machine
from which he used to yank a cold glass bottle of Coca Cola when
he clambered off the school
bus every day while growing up in Sonoma.
"I used to put a dime in the same Coke machine I have at my house," Orlandi
says.
The natural progression of accumulation
became Past Perfect, an offshoot
of his auto-body business that restores the old machines, kids'
pedal cars and whatever rusting hulk of nostalgia he can pluck
from yard sales, auctions
and the universe of eBay.
Which is why Manley isn't spending as much time under cars anymore.
The 34-year-old grew up in Marin and found his Zen for things mechanical
as a boy working on motorcycles and whatever gizmos he could find
around the house.
After studying automotive repair at Indian Valley College, he worked
his way through San Rafael's Canal Area auto repair district, landing
in Orlandi's
shop eight years ago.
He wasn't sure he could fix old jukeboxes until Orlandi asked him.
The old, rusted coke machines didn't look encouraging, either.
"You look at some things and think, 'No way. Throw it in the garbage,'" Manley
says.
But machines are machines, and parts can be replaced, even on 60-year-old
soda machines. The average pinball machine may have 2,000 parts
and 100 tiny light
bulbs, but Manley can tinker them back together. It is a rare talent.
He calls it simply "the basics of taking things apart and
putting them back together."
"Once you understand the system, it's fun," he says.
There have been shocks on the learning curve, frayed wires lending
him the occasional jolt. And the mechanical jukeboxes can be especially
picky.
"If you don't have everything right, it will shoot records at you. I mean
it will hock records at you," Manley says.
Every machine holds a new lesson. The older jukeboxes have paper
and wax capacitors that must all be replaced. In the pinball machines,
every rubber bumper has
to be taken out and every short circuit traced through a bird's
nest of copper wires.
But, as Orlandi says, the pieces are "understandable." The
solid steel gears of a 1949 Coke machine are very tangible and
real in a way that
computer chips and buttons can never be. Sometimes he and Manley
will pull open some creaking machine and just stare at it until
they figure
it out.
"We brainstorm it," Orlandi says.
The problems they can't brainstorm away, they take to the master.
At least once or twice a month, Manley makes a pilgrimage of sorts
to Roseville and the shop of Rick Murillo, the retired Hewlett
Packard tech who now restores
old pinball machines and jukeboxes. Manley works week-long stints
as an apprentice in Murillo's Rock Around the Clock shop.
"He'll hand me an amp and say, 'Rebuild this. I'll come back and check
on you,'" Manley
says.
Much of the work is similar to the basics of the Orlandi family
business - auto body repair. There are the paint booths and sandblasting
equipment.
The hulking metal cabinets housing the old soda machines come in
rusty and leave gleaming. Restoration is restoration.
And Orlandi thinks he can make some money at it.
"It's profitable if you have a body shop," he says.
Indeed, the high-end collectible contraptions come with big price
tags. The restored jukeboxes sell for $6,000. Metal pedal cars
from the 1950s can fetch
$600 when Orlandi's crew is done with them.
Past Perfect will also take in pieces from people who want to bring
life back to a machine they already own. Orlandi and Manley have
the equipment and are
picking up more skills with every new machine they resurrect.
"One of the things that keeps people from doing it themselves is, 'where
do you start?'" Orlandi says. "People don't know where to
go, and they buy things they don't know how to fix."
Orlandi is convinced there is a market for nostalgia -fixing it,
maintaining it, living it. He envisions a whole new business with
a shiny showroom
in Novato, complete with restored vintage cars and a Foster's Freeze
ice cream
machine. "Everybody
takes a piece of growing up with them through life," Orlandi says. "When
you drink a Coke from a tiny glass bottle, it takes you back."
For Manley, it's not so much nostalgia as challenge.
The flippers on the Dracula pinball machine are not flipping, but
they will. The big blue Pepsi machine three feet away is an empty
shell, but it will soon
be clanking ice cold bottles. Machines are machines.
Some are more fun than others, Manley says, standing over the disemboweled
Dracula machine.
"This is fun," he says, "because you get to play with it when
you're done." |
