The Demise of Rapid Rudy

I took some old electronics to an electronics recycling station the other day:  a desktop computer, a dead monitor, and an analog, cathode ray television.  The TV still worked (although it needs a digital converter box to pick up a signal), but the color adjustment was off and it would have needed some work.  It wasn’t worth it.

On the way home, I drove through the neighborhood in which I grew up and discovered something shocking (and inevitable):  Rapid Rudy’s has closed for good.

This rickety shop (it always looked as if it had been built during the Depression) had been a fixture in North Seattle as long as I’d lived there; my dad bought our first TV there, and we took others there for repair through the years.  For over 60 years, it was the kind of small business, like independent barber shops and tiny taverns with kitschy names, which gave identity to neighborhoods. In this case, its neighbors included an Elks Lodge and a strip club. It had a web page (http://rapidrudys.com/index.html) and great customer ratings on Yelp.  What it no longer had, though, was a clientele.

Television was born in an era of sustainability.  The mantra of the Depression and World War generations had been “Use it up, wear it out, make it last, or do without.”  The image was brought to us with the help of vacuum tubes, condensors, resistors, and multi-colored wires, and the devices were maintained by technicians with much the same skills as watchmakers.

Now the mantra is “Costco has a deal on ..”

And, until it falls, a deteriorating sign out on Bothell Way stands as a monument to the old ways.