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The life and times of Denise & Gary Flanders

This is how I remember it

Entry 3

tubes

Another reason I will have 3240 forever imprinted on my memory is because my Dad had a business card that said: “Flanders Radio and TV  3240 Nordman Road Ann Arbor”.  On the card was a drawing/picture of a vacuum tube box.  Aha, this was indeed impressive for a kid.  To see your family name on a 3 1/2 X 2 inch piece of cardboard…now that means something.  (Imagine the delight when a 15 year old is tasked to come up with his very own saying on his very own business card.  I labored long and hard to come up with:  “For the Tops in Rock and Roll records…see Gary Flanders, Flanders Music.”  At long last, I had reached kid nirvana.  I felt like Barney on Andy Griffin show…’he must be a real lawyer Andy, he has a business card.’)

Dad, in order to supplement the family income, went to the DeVry Institute of Technology to learn how to fix all of those radios that people were listening to after world war II.  Then along around 1948 they invent another machine with a big box and a small glass thing on it that had images of people on it.  So, my Dad is in the first class of folks who learn how to understand and fix TVs.  Flanders Radio and TV Repair keeps him busy and his free time is taken up fixing those early models of TVs.  This also means that when someone can’t come up with the $12.37 to pay him for the repair, we get to inherit the TV.  From the time I was born and shared the back bedroom with Van, we had a TV in our room.  My Mom said she would feed me watching the McCarthy hearings on the Edward R Murrow show.

The tiny house in the forest on Nordman did not have any extra room for a repair shop.  Dad’s first shop was in the dirt basement.  It was a kind of storm cellar on the inside.  The only access was a trap door that opened in the middle of the floor very close to the back door.  It was like a rite of passage to disappear while running away from someone.  All of a sudden it was, ‘hey, where is Gary…oh he fell down into Dad’s shop again.’  And, I do admit, it was hilarious to me to walk over to the opening and see Bonnie looking up with that ‘what the..’ look on her face.  Now that is funny stuff.

The Humor Code

Gary & Denise Flanders

2 responses to “This is how I remember it”

  1. Bonnie Avatar
    Bonnie

    Not so funny for me!!! I couldn’t breathe for like a half hour… All the air was knocked out of me. Weird we never got really hurt after falling a whole story of a building… How did we get the shop at the backdoor then? Who built that? My dad was the coolest! He could fix very complex machines like TVs AND make ice cream!!!

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  2. Bonnie Avatar
    Bonnie

    So, I heard a song today that brought me right back to the basement at Flanders Music. It was one of America’s songs. Probably not one you really care for, but I remember being down there browsing through the records, hearing the pinball machines, under the black lights, with my brother at the counter talking with reputable citizens like Kevin Trickey, Danny Hare, and Craig Mullins while exchanging dollars for quarters… I remember Seals and Crofts, and Simon and Garfunkel and little Michelle singing “Cecelia” or listening to Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Maybe you really did bring us all the Tops in Rock and Roll. I had a creative writing professor (at EMU, which finally won big time in football this week…), who said “If you can’t fit your message on a business card, you don’t know what your message is”… Guess you figured it out at a really young age.

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