Helpers Make Man’s Holiday in Nick of Time : Samaritans: An unemployed electrician was too broke to buy gifts for his two sons. But former clients and a dentist changed all that.

Ed Bachelor never gets headaches. But he woke up with one Christmas Eve morning. He had no job, no money and his two young sons were expecting Santa Claus to come that night.

“It was just a terrible headache because of the stress on my shoulders,” said the Ojai electrician, who had lost his job a month before. “I couldn’t figure out how my boys could have a Christmas.”

But Bachelor said Thursday that he will remember this Yule as the most memorable of his life.

“It was a true Christmas, in the best sense,” he said Thursday after several neighbors--and his dentist--transformed a season of hard knocks into a time of giving.

Susan Florence was the first good Samaritan.

Not long after Bachelor’s predicament was reported Tuesday morning in a Times story about jobless workers, the single father got her call.

She and her husband, Jim, had recognized Bachelor from a newspaper photo of him and his sons Keegan, 5, and Trenton, 2. Although it had been years since the electrician had worked for the couple, they’d kept his unlisted telephone number.

“We had liked him and liked his work,” Susan Florence said. “We thought it would be nice to help him out . . . to participate in Christmas.”

Bachelor accepted a donation of more than $100, and a donation from another former customer who called just minutes later, on the condition that he work off both debts.

Dulani La Barre and her husband, Douglas, offered to help, she said, because Bachelor--a lanky, amiable 31-year-old--had been generous with his time and effort when working for the couple.

“We just knew he was caught in a crunch,” Dulani La Barre said. “His kids don’t know what a bad economy means--they just know that Santa is coming. We decided to call and say, ‘You’re right. Santa is coming.’ ”

Both La Barres had been out of work themselves until recently, when he got a job. “It’s flowing at our house again,” she said. “So when I saw Ed, I thought, ‘Yeah, here we go.’ It makes you feel more able, less poor, when you help somebody out.”

By noon, Bachelor’s first $210 unemployment check had also arrived, and he was able to turn down a third offer of aid from a neighbor who had spent the morning tracking him down to ask if she could help.

“Everything went from gloom to Christmas, just like that,” Bachelor said.

A soccer ball, train set and construction blocks--presents from family friends Ray Guevara and son, Greg--were also under the tree by early evening. Then, in a flash, Santa Claus’ red hat poked through the Bachelors’ door and deposited a pair of stuffed animals and other gifts next to the two surprised children.

“It’s Santa, it’s Santa,” the kids squealed, as the family dentist, Larry Simpson, fled without a word into the night.

“I just wanted to give the kids some Christmas cheer,” Simpson said later. “They’d been patients a long time, and I just thought this was something we could do. I hope the boys had a good Christmas.”