John Stadig and the Delco Generator (based on information from Darrell McBreairty's Alcatraz Eel)

John Stadig was a very smart young man, and like his grandfather and many of his uncles, whose family straddled the Maine/New Brunswick border, machines were not a mystery to him. Unlike them however, John wasn’t fond of steady work, but for pocket money he’d make his talents available to what neighbours 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 his barber shop, a bowling alley and a pool hall. In the late 1920s there was no electrical grid running wires into the small towns, 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 out the back of the building.

            One day John was strolling up the dusty road with one hand in his trousers and the other eating 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 stroll nonchalantly past the barber shop. George was there in the dim room with a half groomed customer, and looking rather flustered. When he saw John walking by he smiled with relief. “John”, he said “Boy am I glad to see you! My Delco stalled and I got no lights!”

“Gee, that’s too bad Mr. Lausier” John said sympathetically “Let me have a look.” He went down to the basement and made some noise around the machine for a while, then he came back up and said “Mr. Lausier, 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 started right away, George gratefully gave John a few dollars for his expert help and he 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.