YOUR SPACE: No technology needed to find stuff in crowded repair shop

Mike Urban likes the simple life.

No cell phone. No computer. No steady paycheck. No wife, at the moment.

"None of that stuff," he says, sounding very happy.

He lives with his cat in his electronics repair shop in downtown Green Mountain Falls. It's as downtown as he wants to get.

Watch your step in his indoor salvage yard of resistors, transistors, wires, knobs, gears, obsolete TV tubes.

"As the old guys die off I get all their old tubes. I got four dead guys' tubes up there," he says, pointing to the 20-by-70 foot congestion of clutter.

You know those pictures of a tornado's aftermath? That's what his shop looks like.

It's taken him 12 years to get it like this. He knows where everything is.

For locals, he's the hardware store. Need deck screws? He'll dig through his giant screw jar and find some. Free, of course.

Paying customers find him, somehow, and bring or mail him broken amps, lamps, turntables, reel-to-reels.

"Things the geeky guys don't fix. I live day-to-day. The margins are slim. There's no blue book. It's what it sold for last week . . . by a guy on eBay."

The benefits: "It's a nice honest enterprise. It's human-based engineering. We've gone so far beyond that now, to where our technologies don't adapt to us, we have to adapt to them. Technology is the master now and we are the slave," he says.

Don't get him started on wireless devices. "If I have to make AT&T rich with this gadget, it's probably something I don't really need," he says.

Spoken like a true funky-shirted, psychedelic ball-capped, graying ponytailed 54-year-old hippie.

Urban needs tunes, just not from an iPod. His retro Marantz radio receiver does the job. If he gets lonely, he can push the button on a toy James Brown figure that gyrates while singing "I Feel Good."

Urban plays saxophone at local clubs. He graduated from Boston's Berklee College of Music.

"I started out in music school fixing guitar amplifiers to pay the rent. Then I kind of painted my way across country and ran out of money in Colorado Springs in 1978," he says.

"I went to school here for industrial optics. I spent five years building bombs. I never felt good about it when I went home."

The divorced dad of grown sons had a Springs fix-it shop before moving to this place that's his home.

There's a bed in there, somewhere. A bathtub on makeshift wheels holds inventory, and another story.

"It's a hooker's tub. It's out of Crystola - there used to be a hooker's camp up there. It's remarkably well-preserved considering everything that probably went on in it."

He has plans for it. "It's probably going to be my next sink, being as I don't have a sink," he says.

Tell me your stories: 636-0253 or andrea.brown@gazette.com.