A Fix-It Man With the <i> Knack</i>

Norman Slobin has a knack. He fixes things. In the neighborhood, they have a saying: “If Norman can’t fix it, it can’t be fixed.”

For 53 years, Slobin has run his own store in East Los Angeles. Nothing fancy. A store. Slobin’s Hardware Store.

Slobin opened the place in 1936 on $400--”a lot of money in those days.” He’d come to America from the Soviet Union when he was 12 and fetched up in Detroit. One day in the 1930s an uncle said, “You want a taxicab? Here. Take mine. It’s yours.”

Slobin did not like the taxi business. “I said I’d give it a year. I did. One year precisely. Then I came to California. Relatives said I could find work here. I did . . . driving a taxi.”

But Slobin had this knack. “He’d find old pieces of what looked like junk,” says Julie Angelos, a granddaughter. “He’d repair it and sell it for a profit.” So he opened the store.

“It’s nothing,” says Slobin. “You have something that’s broken but maybe the blade works. You take a gear from another broken piece. You put the parts together. I remember making an electric heater that way, back when they didn’t have electric heaters. Didn’t look like much but it worked.”

Slobin runs the store alone these days, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. He’s 81. Next month they’ll close the place. The landlord of the building died and his niece is selling the property.

In Slobin’s Hardware Store, Dorothy, a retired L.A. schoolteacher and Norman’s wife of 54 years, says, “I just told a woman we’re closing. She cried. Fifty years, you know. Everybody counted on Norman. The neighborhood’s changed. It’s time to move on.”

Move where? Certainly not back to the Motherland. “We visited Russia a few years ago,” says Norman. “I tell you, anyone who’s not satisfied with America should go there. One day is all it would take. One day.”

The Slobins are active square dancers, following the circuit. Norman took up golf a few years ago. Still, it’s hardly enough to fill a man’s time. “I’ll find something,” says Slobin. “I don’t know what the fuss is about. For 50 years I’ve done an honest day’s work for an honest dollar. This is remarkable?”

This is remarkable.

Putting Out a Yodel for the Missing Swiss

It’s like living in a post card. The Swiss canton (state) of Valais boasts what may be the prettiest villages in the world, hamlets cuddling the banks of the Rhone River or jauntily perched on the scarps of the Matterhorn. Why anyone would leave is a mystery.

Leave they did, though. In the 1800s, propelled by hardship, religious bias or both, disenchanted Valaisans scattered to Brazil, Argentina, even to Southern California. To its expatriates, Valais now sends a message: Come home, all is forgiven.

The occasion will be the 700th anniversary of the Swiss Constitution, in August of 1991. Each canton plans an extravaganza of its own; Valais is attempting a vast ingathering of great-great-grandchildren, third cousins, wives-by-marriage, what have you.

In America, Bob Klimko coordinates the search for American Valaisans from his Wisconsin home. In the Southland, regional director Jacquelyn Williams of Moreno Valley is scouring desert and palm for likely candidates. For her own part, she can’t wait to return to her roots. “My (Swiss) grandfather drummed into us that the Swiss were honest, above all,” says Williams. “They--we--are thrifty, determined, clean. I remember the first time I went there, I couldn’t get over the geraniums they’d planted between the railroad track; the way the shopkeepers would go home for lunch and leave their doors unlocked. . . .”

Not that they’re perfect, at least not a century ago. Klimko’s great-grandfather was virtually forced to emigrate because he was born illegitimate--and did very well in the States, thank you. Williams’ great-grandfather was bullied out of town after he’d bought a Bible (!). “It wasn’t a Catholic Bible,” she explains.

A century later, these and other wounds will be healed, and perhaps another misconception laid to rest. “They say the Swiss don’t know how to have fun,” Williams says. “I disagree. I think they really enjoy life, mainly because they don’t have to worry about somebody ripping them off.”