The recent Irvington Repair Cafe was featured in the new Rivertowns Dispatch, a new news source for the Rivertowns that is currently only distributed as an email. See below for the text of the article. To subscribe to the Rivertowns Dispatch, sign up here.
Decades intersect at repair cafe (Emailed out June 7, 2024)
Mary Slavinski’s radio/cassette/record player, Thom Thacker’s electric drill, and Linda Keil’s AM/FM/shortwave radio were among the 175 items brought to the Repair Café held at the Irvington Public Library on Saturday, June 1, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Of that total, 139 were fixed by 25 volunteer repair coaches, including Slavinski’s record player, which had a needle issue, and Thacker’s drill, which had a power chord problem. Keil’s radio was not fixed, but she was told that she could purchase new capacitors and have them installed at a future repair café.
Slavinski’s record player was repaired by Wiley Weinmann, a seventh-grader at Dobbs Ferry Middle School with an interest in audio equipment made decades before he was born. To test the needle, he used his own copy of “More of the Monkees,” a vinyl album released in 1967.
Thacker’s drill was repaired by Richard Kreisberg of White Plains, who worked as a radio engineer and at Wakefield Paint, a hardware store his grandfather opened in the Bronx in 1929. He now volunteers at St. Bart’s Thrift Shop in White Plains.
Keil’s radio was examined by Dean Gallea of Tarrytown, who worked for Consumer Reports from 1974 to 2016. Gallea tested audio products and then computer hardware and software. He retired as a senior program leader.
In the Rivertowns, repair cafes started in Hastings in 2019, in Dobbs Ferry in 2021, in Irvington in 2022, and in Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow in 2023. The Town of Greenburgh joined that list last month.
Since 2022, Suzie Fromer of Irvington has been the coordinator for Repair Café Hudson Valley, which oversees events in Albany, Columbia, Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rensselaer, Rockland, Saratoga, Schenectady, Sullivan, Ulster, Warren, Washington, and Westchester counties.
John Wackman organized the first repair café in the Hudson Valley, in New Paltz, in 2013. The first repair café worldwide was in Amsterdam in 2009.
“I think repair cafes are an incredibly ‘sticky’ idea,” Fromer said about their popularity. “They’re fantastic, fun community events that help you save money (something people are definitely responding to more nowadays), teach you about how your own things work, and mean you're not adding to the waste problem in our society.”
The next Rivertowns Repair Café will be at the James Harmon Community Center in Hastings on Saturday, Oct. 5, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.