Grandpa Buys a Pop Rivet Tool

At one point before I bought my own house, I thought home repairs were one of my skills. I helped my grandfather, Gilbert Ellis, make repairs to our house and the flat he lived in. Grandpa Ellis taught me how to replace electrical outlets, washers on sinks and build lots of things with wood. I put together lots of prefabricated furniture over the years.

In 1997, my wife Tamara and I bought a house. I quickly discovered that I did not have any talent for home repairs. Grandpa Ellis had all the talent. I was there to hand him tools, lift stuff and laugh at his jokes which were really funny anyway.

Grandpa Ellis possessed excellent mechanical ability. In the 1940s, Grandpa built a house from the foundation up in Mascoutah, IL. When my parents bought our house on Villa in St. Louis, Grandpa found aluminum wire in the ceiling. Grandpa took it all out himself and replaced it with copper wire.

After he retired in 1981, Grandpa liked to do repair projects for family members. We removed a mini-wall in our house on Villa, built retaining walls down at the lake and built shelves and other furniture.

In 1986, we built a boat dock at the lake. Grandpa was 71 years old, standing in the boat and driving all the poles into the lake with a 16 pound sledge-hammer. No one called him an old man.

Around the same time, Grandpa bought a new tool to fix his lawn chairs. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, lawn chairs were made of webbing. The webbing would occasionally become frayed or break. You would then have to throw away the chair.

Grandpa bought a pop rivet tool to repair the webbing. He loved this tool so much that before I knew it, we were taking in every lawn chair in the family, buying webbing from Hannecke’s Hardware and repairing chairs.

We could fix a chair in less than fifteen minutes. I would hold the webbing in place, Grandpa would make sure my hands were out of the way and then sink the rivet. Grandma Ellis has 11 living siblings with large families of their own, so we had plenty of business that summer. Grandpa charged $5 a chair plus supplies.

One day we were working on some chairs from an uncle, who I knew got on Grandpa’s nerves. I asked why we were doing chairs for him. Grandpa said, “I’m charging him $7 a chair; two dollars extra for pain and suffering.”

Grandpa made a couple hundred dollars that summer, which more than paid for his pop rivet tool. He considered starting his own lawn chair repair business but decided it might interfere with his fishing schedule.

We didn’t use the tool much for the next several years because we had replaced the webbing on about every chair in the family but it led to a summer of fun times working with Grandpa.

I was lucky to be able to spend so much time with my grandfather, whose life lessons have benefited me and which I passed down to my children. Thank you, Grandpa.

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