The Mundy History left you in 1975. The adventure of towing the Singer home from Washington State, through Oregon and California, across the desert, over the Rockies and into our garage. Here’s what happened next:
Corey’s garage in Sunnyvale.
Towing home.
1975 shows a small fraction of the receipts collected on the way home started the growing file of parts and pieces before I could even start the rebuild.
1976 saw me shooting regular orders into J.C. Whitney and renting tools from Alex Rents. I even found an original Singer top at Sears! I had joined the North American Singer Owner’s Club (NASOC) and was starting to get leads and help from other members. That, of course led to many correspondences with dealers and collectors in New Zealand, Australia, England, British Columbia, South America and India. When the leader of NASOC became discouraged because membership was down and he could get no help, I sent him a 9-page “pep talk” and volunteered to put together a directory and parts substitution booklet. I can’t remember if anything really happened, but, man, I was enthusiastic!
Pretty basic and mimeographed…can you remember that process?
The tear-down gets serious.
1977-1979 - There were SIX chrome plating businesses in Colorado Springs. Now, there are NONE in the STATE! (More about chrome in 2018). I was buying books and magazines like crazy and spending a fortune in dimes xeroxing everything I could find about Singers in books and magazines in the library (lousy copies!). It was more of the same: letters to England and miscalculating the monetary exchange, however, great, trusting blokes who eventually sorted it out. There was even a large-tank ZipStrip outfit that could dunk and strip a whole automotive frame in just a couple of hours! I was buying spray cans of multicolored primer on sale all over town!
Add to all of this, between ’73 and ’90 we were making major improvements to our first house on Cache la Poudre St.: We were heating the 2-story house with a wood stove necessitating opening whole walls to provide return air flows and weeks of tree-felling, wood splitting, etc.; I carved a wooden bathtub, built an 8 ft.+ tall rotating pantry out of huge wooden spools from utility wire, dug a sunken patio and stuccoed over ammo boxes for the circular seating, then built an elevated deck with hammock; dug out the front porch area and poured 9 tons of river rock around hundreds of gallons of contained water for a passive solar addition, converted a closet into a darkroom containing an 8” x 10” enlarger. Somewhere in here we extended the house to include another bedroom and bathroom, and Cathy turned all of the painted shingles around and nailed them back with their natural sides out. We travelled, we worked multiple jobs, helped friends and raised two young children. Damn, we were busy!
Smaller format for the newsletter, but still great information.
