(Photo of Mister Jalopy’s dog, Coco, who apparently owns the store Mister Jalopy manages.)
The very handy Mister Jalopy was profiled by AP reporter John Rogers today.
Deep in the bowels of his musty gadget workshop, he is surrounded by shelves filled with literally tens of thousands of nuts, bolts, washers, springs, hand tools and seemingly every other gizmo imaginable, in seemingly every size and shape ever made.
He needs them all, he says, for everything from his repair jobs to his more esoteric projects, such as the drive-in movie theater projector he built out of a light bulb, old bookshelves, some junked electrical parts and a kitchen table he found abandoned by the side of a road.
He mounted the finished product onto the back of an adult-sized tricycle, and now when he’s in the mood for a movie, he can simply pedal the thing up to a building and project his film onto the wall.
“Rather than moan and groan about the death of the drive-in movie theater, I decided to build my own,” he says with a shrug and a sly smile.