LOOMING DEADLINE
Vintage equipment repair shop has days to move
Martin Hanson’s first paying job in electronics was fixing a Pontiac car radio.
“We had no electricity on the farm, so I used a forge with hot coals for my soldering iron,” he recalls.
He was 11 years old. Almost 54 years later, with a few detours, he’s still tuned in to the world of capacitors, resistors and glowing radio tubes.
“He delights in getting the best sound out of this equipment,” says customer Eric Westberg. “Having one of these machines running the way it was designed and at peak performance, that really gratifies him.”
Hanson, proprietor and sole employee of Jay Martin Audio, leaves his 750-square-foot apartment on Avenue U South with a sandwich in a 1970s lunch box. He climbs the stairs to his shop in a windowless room in a huge downtown warehouse, puts on his name tag and plugs into a kind of living museum.
He’s the last tenant. The building has been sold. He has until April 30 to get out. And that’s the one thing he can’t fix.
Hanson has what looks like an impossible deadline looming — just days to pack and move countless parts and components, from hundreds of vacuum tubes to atomic-age testing equipment to AM radio time machines that would have broadcast the D -Day invasion and Buddy Holly singing Peggy Sue.
Suffering serious health issues over the winter made it difficult to catch up. Hanson says he works 14 hours a day, seven days a week when he can. Feeling much better lately, he said he would ramp that up.
“It’s going to be very time-consuming, and I’m up against it. There aren’t enough days left in the month for me. I’ll be working 15 to 20 hours a day now.”
Aware of the herculean task, even customers like Westberg have offered to lend a hand. Martin has the kind of personality that makes you want to help, he says.
Indeed, there is something about the man — a placid demeanour that fails to hint at the pressure he’s under, a giggle that belies his 64 years.
As a child, Hanson taught himself electronics from a book in the high school library, Elements of Radio by Abraham and William Marcus. It was 800 pages long.
By the time he left school after Grade 10, he’d checked the book out 17 times.
Over the years, he witnessed the rise and fall of the VCR and compact disc, the surprise comeback of the turntable record player. He doesn’t fix TVs anymore but he takes an ailing eight-track tape player as seriously as a 1950s Fender guitar amplifier.
Hanson points out a 1,000-page repair manual for 1930s radios given to him by a mentor who died recently. To him, it’s a sacred parchment. He talks about getting new parts machined for a rare jukebox from Wyoming. He tells you how to keep your microwave oven running forever.
Retiring isn’t an option. He says he can’t afford it. But it might really be that he enjoys the work too much. In some way, the old radios have kept him young.
“There’s something else to learn every day.”
Hanson vows to reopen — somewhere — within two weeks of finding a place. He might even advertise, “make a splash,” as he puts it — something he’s never had to do. Something that would seem decidedly out of character.
“How long are you going to keep going?” a visitor asks.
“As long as I hold out.”
It’s going to be very timeconsuming and I’m up against it. There aren’t enough days left in the month for me. I’ll be working 15 to 20 hours a day.