Home on the Range : ‘Hospital’ Restores and Repairs About 3,000 Stoves a Year

When Victor Smith talks about stoves, his eyes brighten, his hands stab the air as if delivering a barbershop sermon and his voice rises a bit no matter how small the audience.

A tall, cheerful man who always seems in a rush, the 47-year-old Smith presides over A-1 Stove Hospital, one of the county’s largest stove repair yards. The cluttered South-Central business may not look like much, but its expertise has drawn customers ranging from housewives to professional chefs to Barbra Streisand and Nancy Reagan.

“There is no one around who can do work anywhere near what (Smith) can do,” said Don Silvers, a professional chef and kitchen designer. “He is one of the most knowledgeable and professional craftsmen around.”

Smith’s reputation has grown to the point where stove manufacturers routinely refer their customers to A-1 Stove Hospital when they can’t repair a stove or provide a part. “If we can’t fix it,” Smith said smiling, “you might as well put a death certificate on it.”

Lee and Jerome Siegel, who live in the Hollywood Hills, turned to A-1 after the factory was unable to repair their 18-year-old Gaffers & Sattler double oven.

“We were going to get rid of it,” Jerome Siegel said. “But someone told us about A-1. No one else had the parts, but (Smith) did.”

The Siegels paid $650 to have their double oven repaired and said the cost was well worth it. “The place looks like hell,” Jerome Siegel said, “but they sure do classy work.”

The front door of the 4,000-square-foot store at 1214 E. Florence Ave. opens into an appliance showroom that leads to a dark workshop with a concrete floor. Behind the workshop is what Smith affectionately calls the stove graveyard, the area where stoves are cleaned, taken apart and stored according to parts, size and year.

Though A-1 Stove Hospital sells and services an array of appliances, the store has earned much of its reputation by repairing and restoring stoves. The stoves, some of which date back to the turn of the century, include makes such as O’Keefe & Merritt, Magic Chef, Gaffers & Sattler and Wedgewood.

Smith estimated that A-1 repairs and restores 3,000 stoves a year. Typically, Smith said, it takes more than 240 hours to restore a stove. He asks customers to be patient and insists on lending them a stove until he has completed the work.

“I’m an artist,” Smith said. “When you hand over your stove, you better not rush me on it. Good things take time.”

In the showroom, a white enamel 1949 O’Keefe & Merritt range with six burners, two ovens and a warmer awaits restoration. When refurbished, the stove, which originally cost about $900 and which Smith bought for $500 at a garage sale, will sell for more than $6,000, he said.

“Some people pay a big price,” said Harvey Perlman, manager of A-1. “But they don’t care. They want the best.”

Much of A-1 Stove Hospital’s success has to do with the foresight of Perlman, who opened the store in 1955 and sold it to Smith last year but stayed on as manager. Perlman, 70, said the stove preservation and restoration business started to boom when cooks opted to repair their older stoves instead of purchasing new models.

Unlike recent-model gas and electric ranges, Smith said, older stoves were often assembled individually with superior materials such as cast iron, steel and chrome instead of the aluminum and tin used in contemporary stoves. Because older stoves have several layers of insulation, they conserve heat better than newer ones and bake faster and more evenly, Smith said.

“If you go three years without a repair on a new stove you’re lucky,” Perlman said. “With the older ones if something goes wrong in 30 years, you got a bad stove.”

As years passed and many stove manufacturers went out of business or merged with larger companies, Perlman said, the factories sold to him, and at times gave him, all the spare parts he could store.

Consequently, A-1 can provide a variety of new parts for stoves that are no longer made, including grills dating to the 1920s, range-top clocks and timers, oven-door springs, glass doors, racks, burners, door handles, knobs and gas pilots.

“Parts, parts, parts, all parts,” Perlman said during a tour of a dark and dusty attic storage area. “We never throw a thing away because if we don’t use it, somebody else will need it.”

Smith got his start in the stove business when he went to work for Perlman in 1974. The next year, Smith opened his own stove restoration business, the Hollywood Stove Museum, which he sold.

Smith still keeps an office at 5215 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood to meet with designers and customers who come from as far as New Mexico, San Francisco, San Diego and Hawaii. Despite the expertise available at A-1, some customers are wary of South-Central. “A lot of people don’t want to come down here, especially after the riots,” Smith said.

Beyond the nuts and bolts of stove repair, Smith is also known for restoring stoves using unconventional enamel colors such as red, blue and gold, as well as chrome to refinish older models.

“He knows how to use different materials and has a perception for what looks good,” Silvers said. “He has a designer’s eye.”

The kitchen of Smith’s Westside home features a 1947, almond-colored Wedgewood range with a double oven. He said he and his 11-year-old son, Victor Jr., restored the classic stove that has been appraised at $3,000.

Leafing through a scrapbook with pictures of stoves he has restored, Smith said he no longer photographs his work.

“I’d get very attached to them and wouldn’t want to sell them,” said Smith, who dreams of opening a restaurant and vintage stove museum next to each other. “Now I just keep them in my mind.”