Mitchell Wasserberg, Sewing Machine Repairman

In this week's episode, life-long New Yorker and go-to Westchester sewing machine repairman, Mitch Wasserberg, shares stories about growing up in the family trimmings and fabric business and discusses how got his start in with sewing machines. This interview was recorded on February 13th, 2020 in Hartsdale, NY.
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Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

Sewing Community is part of ArtsWestchester's Folk Arts Program, made possible in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.   

Transcript

 01:28
Mitchell Wasserberg is my name and I grew up in Yonkers, New York. I presently live in Hartsdale. I lived a couple of years in Carmel, NY and we came back to Hartsdale because I was working in Bayside, Queens, at the time, in the sewing machine business. I’ve been doing this since 1970, the same year that I graduated high school. I went to college for a year and seven-eighths to play baseball. Didn’t finish, and I got involved in the sewing machine-trimming-fabric business with my parents and my brother in 82nd street and Broadway. From there we went to Riverdale in the Bronx, Bayside Queens, two stores on Mamaroneck Avenue in White Plains, not far from 31 Mamaroneck Avenue, the Galleria Mall, the White Plains Mall, and now a small shop in Hartsdale. Knocking on doors, repairs, learning the business from many many people over the years. Each one has something special that I learned from and has kept me going for all these years. I have no complaints in this business. Still enjoy it, still get a kick out of it. Not as easy as it used to be due to the internet. 70% of the mom and pop stores are done, finished, due to the internet – they just can’t compete.  In a small shop, with one person, it’s doable and I’ve done it, and so far so good.  

02:48
A lot of phone calls. They’ll call and say “do you fix an old machine?” and I’ll say “how old is the machine?” And they will say “10 years old” and I will tell them “10 years old is still a teenager, a baby.”  A lot of retail sewing machine stores will not fix old machines. I don’t know why. Maybe they can’t, maybe they don’t have any way of getting the parts, buy my livelihood is fixing the old machines…the older the better. They fix well, and they were made well. The newer machines, some of them are very difficult to fix because they just don’t come apart. They are made to be thrown away. The older German PFAFF machines are beautiful to work on. They fix well. The older black Singer sewing machines, the old heavy duty metal sewing machines can last forever, if they taken care of.

03:36
The machine fixing end came from watching a couple older gentleman, my age now, early 80s, who worked at a Singer factory in Mount Vernon. I would go over there Saturday mornings and watch them fix machines. They would allow me. They knew my parents had a dealership in the Bronx. So I would drive over to Mount Vernon to watch a couple of these guys do some work. Some of them would help. Some of them didn’t want to give away their secrets. And just taking the machines apart and working on them until you got it right, and finding out what mistakes you made, and learning from that.

04:15
My mother’s father had a trimming store on the lower east side.  My mother was a kid…11-12 years old. She worked the store downstairs. My grandfather who died when I was born lived upstairs, and when my grandmother needed help, she would ring a button or a bell and he would come down. So the trimming business has been in my mother’s family from the turn of the century. My father got involved in the trimming business with my mother’s brother, Murry. They worked together in New York City.  My Uncle Murry went his own way. My Father had stores in Harlem, 850 Amsterdam Ave. As a 5-year-old kid I used to go down with my father and just sit and watched what he did for a living. I never really knew what he did because it was called trimmings.  In school, when you would fill out what your parents did for living, I would write trimmings, not knowing what the heck it was. I later learned what it was.  That’s a true story. 

05:11
Trimmings would be pearls, sequins, rhinestones… anything that had glitter to it that would attract the eye to bring people into a store.  And we also handled a lot of yarn in the old days. Yarn was a big deal. I guess this would probably be 1980-85. All kinds of yarn. And my job was to go park the car in the lower east side and walk to all the shops and pick up all kinds of odds and ends and merchandise that we could sell uptown, 82nd street.

05:44
It was a tiny store across the street from the New York Ballet.  The ballet used to come in and buy all kinds of pink ribbon for their ballerina shoes. So trimming was a big deal. We also sold to some of the people in TV commercials, used to come in. I can’t remember the names. One guy, he was very famous. He did the Kola nut commercial. Big tall guy. He would come in. And a lot of the celebrities would come in with their children to buy odds and ends. One of our favorite customers in the old days was Sugar Ray Robinson’s mother. She is long gone. Her name was Mae Robinson. She was an unbelievable sweetheart, one of my father’s nicest and best customers and she would talk about her son, who my father grew up watching. Jerry Stiller used to pass by, we’d wave to him – this was 82nd street and Broadway.  Ben Gazzara would pass by and wave, Ann Meara, Mayor Kotch and Elston Howard. He was a baseball player. He would pass by in the Bronx store.

06:42
One quick little story that I remember from watching my father…we used to have high-end buttons, believe it or not, called rhinestone buttons. My father would go out of his way and spend hours with the salesmen, picking out beautiful buttons, rhinestone buttons, that would be purchased by my father and put into silver boxes with tissue paper, to make them look more attractive. My job was the buttons, I was called the button guy and I would sew all the buttons on the outside of the box, put them on a wall and wait for someone to purchase them. One gentleman came in from New York City who was on TV commercials and two weeks in a row he would buy these buttons on Saturday and return them on Monday. And to return $15, $20, $25 bucks was a big hit in those days. So the third Monday he came in and he said “sorry, but again, these don’t match.”  I looked at them and there was thread left on the outer part of all these buttons. I think they were $3.50 each and it was a big deal in the old days.  I looked at him, and before we did anything, I said to him “By the way how was the show?” and he goes “The show was great I....” He stepped right in it.  What he did is, he would use these buttons on his TV commercials, sew them onto the garment, and then bring them back and get another set of a different style, until we finally put two and two together.

08:06
My parents got involved in the fabric business mostly in the Bronx, 5539 Broadway in Riverdale 231st Street. Big big store. It was actually rented by my father through the Singer Company, so someone had to take care of the sewing machines and there was no one there. When I went in, I got involved with it…enjoyed it. They gave me about 30, 50 square feet of a 2,000 square foot store to do the machines, because no one really believed that you could make a living doing it. Well we did. It expanded and I left the fabric business and got more involved with the machines, repairs, factory machines, because there were a couple dollars involved.  The fabric business, which I love and to this day, I still do…very difficult. That was in the 80s. When we moved up to the Galleria, it was a huge fabric store. Did very very well. But in Westchester County the rents  again, did not allow us to make a living selling fabric. The machines is what really allows me to make a living and I enjoy it. I tell people straight out what’s up, what’s not up… fixable not fixable.  At my age, if they believe me that’s great and if they don’t, that’s okay too.