John Stadig and the Delco Generator

     I have written these stories based on facts and rumours about this cousin of mine that were researched by Darrel McBreairty in his book about him (see image). This first story is based on a popular tale about John Stadig. The second and third stories are based on real events. I have used creative licence to present in each story a possible scenario as to how the events might have unfolded.

 

    John Stadig was a very smart young man, and like his grandfather and many of his cousins and uncles, whose family straddled the American /Canadian border in northern Maine and New Brunswick, machines were not a mystery to him. Unlike them however, John wasn’t all that fond of steady work, but for pocket money he’d make his talents available to what neighbours up there in St. Francis, Maine could afford to own machinery. If something didn’t run, he’d fix it and people would pay him. Sometimes though when John was broke and there was nothing broken to fix, he felt the need to make his own opportunities.
    One of his customers was a barber named George Lausier who owned a building where he kept not only his barber shop, but also a bowling alley and a pool hall. In the late 1920s there was no electrical grid running wires out into small towns like St. Francis, so in George’s basement he had what was called a Delco Light Generator, which had an internal combustion engine with an exhaust pipe going up and out through the back of the building.
    One day John was strolling up the dusty road with one hand in his trousers and the other helping him eat an apple that he’d plucked from someone’s back yard, when the hand in his pocket found that he was short for a pack of cigarettes. He ducked around back of George’s place and shoved the uneaten half of the apple into the exhaust pipe of George’s Delco, waited a while and then came back out front to the barber shop.
George was there in the dim room with a half groomed customer, and looking rather flustered. When he saw John he smiled with relief.
“John”, he said “Boy am I glad to see you! My Delco stalled and I got no lights!”
John tsked and shook his head in sympathy. “Let me have a look.” he said.
He went down in the basement and made some noise around the machine for a while, pretending to be fixing it. Then he came back up and said “George, I want you to go downstairs and try to start it when I tell you. I’m going out back, so I can hear what it’s doing if it turns over.”
    So John went over to the pipe, use his jack-knife to pry out the apple and then whooped down to George through the basement window, “Okay Mr. Lausier, give’er a try!” Of course it would start right away. George gratefully paid him well for saving the day and John Stadig was on his way.
    It paid in those days to know something about machines, just like it cost some people, like George Lausier, to know nothing about them.