Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 13, 1994 TAG: 9403120003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The customer waits. He carries a broken CB radio - and faith.
Faith in Albert McKnight.
From the back room, McKnight steps up and leans against the doorway. He leans his weight where the paint on the doorway has worn away, exposing the bare wood underneath. To the customer, it is a familiar pose.
McKnight wears his familiar uniform: navy blue work pants, black shoes and white socks, a button-down shirt and blue baseball jacket, the same jacket he always wears, whether it's winter or summer. His gray-white hair is cut into a stubbled flattop.
Bifocal eyeglasses frame his 66-year-old face.
"What ya say there?" he says from his doorway.
"I think I've got a problem," the customer replies, handing over the radio.
All around them, there are boxes and old radios and assorted electronic junk that have been accumulating in McKnight's shop since before Richard Nixon was president. It is truly an astounding clutter, an embattled shrine to disarray - and a different era.
The polar opposite of some place like Radio Shack.
On a shelf sits an antiquated high-fidelity amplifier, its oversized tubes threaded with cobwebs. There are reel-to-reel tapes of Loretta Lynn, Wayne Newton and The Marvelettes. On the wall hangs a framed copy of McKnight's Citizens Radio Station License that expired in 1973.
The shop hours are posted:
Open most days about 9 or 10, occasionally as early as 7. But some days as late as 12 or 1. We close about 5:30 or 6, occasionally about 4 or 5. But sometimes as late as 11 or 12. Some days or afternoons, we aren't here at all, and lately I've been here just about all the time except when I'm someplace else, but I should be here then, too.
"They're pretty true," McKnight says, only half-joking.
Then there are the CB radios: hundreds of them, maybe thousands, unboxed, stacked high, row after row, shelf upon shelf, covering entire walls, spilling out into the aisles, gobbling precious floor space, creeping out of control, like kudzu in July.
At the center of this hailstorm, McKnight holds court, the master of his own disorder.
Leaning on the doorway, he inspects the customer's radio.
He speaks plainly, with the defined North Carolina drawl he has never lost from his boyhood days growing up with Andy Griffith. He calls Coke, "Co-Cola," he often twiddles his thumbs while he talks, and he answers his telephone, "Mack-Knight." He still uses an old rotary dial phone.
"There ain't nothing I can do to it right now," he tells the customer.
McKnight stays permanently backlogged with repair work. "But I can test it for you."
Radio in hand, he shuffles into the back room and sits at his repair bench. Like the rest of his shop, it is also a study in chaos, with its overflowing drawers that haven't been closed in years, and with only a small space on the bench top clear of the advancing clutter.
He sits in a padded chair that long ago lost its softness.
Basically, the radio is shot. He connects it to a meter to test its output. Then he tries a different microphone, but the most life it shows is an uneven static. The customer can hear the bad news for himself.
"You don't have any used CBs for sale do you?" he asks.
McKnight shoots a mischievous look all around them.
"I might have a couple."
He stands and pulls one off a nearby shelf. He hands it to the man, who likes the $35 price.
"You got two of these?"
"Not plum ready," McKnight anwers. "If you come tomorrow, I will."
The man explains. He and a buddy use CBs to talk between trucks when they go four-wheeling.
"We're heading for the mountain tonight."
McKnight shrugs sympathetically. "I've got new ones for $50."
Back-and-forth they go. Finally, McKnight plucks out a particularly battered model.
"There's one that don't look like much, but it works real good."
The man looks it over.
McKnight waits, leaning again in his doorway. "I'll take $20," he says.
Satisfied, the man hands over his money.
No sales receipt is exchanged.
Faith.
At the Albert McKnight Co., his word is all that's necessary.
All day long, similar scenes are repeated.
A woman asks about buying a used microphone for her husband.
"Why would he want a used one when he can have a new one at used price?"
He finds one for her anyway. She asks how much?
"Don't know till I can find out how well it works."
He tests it at his work bench. Other customers are waiting.
She apologizes. "Sorry I caught you at a bad time."
"I don't know when a good time is."
A customer asks: "Do you ever do the buy-sell-trade thing?
McKnight nods. "Let's see what you got."
To the faithful, McKnight's cluttered shop on Shenandoah Avenue is a haven.
Yet from the outside, it almost appears abandoned. The roadside sign is weather-beaten, easy to miss. The modest white building looks lonely and neglected, in need of fresh paint. Several old tires lean against its walls.
The faded red front door is bordered by two rickety light fixtures. One of the lights is missing its bulb. A sheet of paper stapled above the doorway shows the address - 4549. The numbers are handwritten. A rusted horseshoe hangs from a nail, tilting haplessly.
The shop stands like a monument to America before the age of interstates and chain stores.
Here, McKnight greets his loyal customers by name, offering his prognosis for their troubled radios, occasionally their troubled lives, and often finding himself humbled by the kindness and generosity they offer in return.
"It makes me feel awfully small sometimes," he says.
Like somebody from Mayberry, RFD, which isn't far from the truth.
McKnight was raised in Mount Airy, N.C., the same town that spawned Andy Griffith and inspired the fictional Mayberry of his television show. Growing up, McKnight knew Andy Griffith. The two were classmates. They walked to school together. Their fathers worked side by side at the local furniture factory.
In interviews, Andy Griffith often has credited McKnight for first kindling his career in comedy.
The story goes that they were sitting together at a school assembly. McKnight was supposed to stand and recite a poem. But when Griffith, who was sitting in the aisle seat, stood to let McKnight pass, his classmate just sat there smirking. The usually shy Griffith, pressured by a chorus of hoots and howls from the student body, recited the poem instead.
Between lines, he added his own commentary on what he thought of the poem and McKnight's stunt. The hollering quickly turned into laughter, and he has since cited the episode many times as the moment he realized he could be funny.
Of course, McKnight claims now he doesn't remember the prank.
"I wouldn't put that past me back then, I just don't recall it that way."
Through the grapevine, he has heard other stories his celebrity classmate has told over the years. One had him slugging Griffith. "Oh, if he had given me cause, I would have." But he never did. "That don't even ring of the truth," he says.
"I ain't never hit Andy Griffith. I ain't never hit Andy."
Perhaps it was just an exaggerated spin on their opposite school images. McKnight played football. Griffith didn't. "He didn't play a lot of cow pasture football with us rowdy fellas." He sang in the Glee Club.
"That sissy stuff."
Later, McKnight was a fan of his classmate's television show. He says the McKnight name was often brought up. He would listen for it. "Evidently, they needed a name, and mine just happened to be handy," he surmises now.
There were other things he noticed, too, where having the background helped. "Like he talked about going into the Bluebird Cafe. He didn't go into the Bluebird Cafe. That was a beer joint. He went into the Snappy Lunch."
One story that never made it into Mayberry folklore, however, was McKnight's boyhood encounter with a hollow-point bullet, fired into his stomach by a reckless kid with a rifle who lived nearby.
"He was playing cowboy. You know how kids are. They aren't always smart all the time."
McKnight was 15.
"I stood there 15 or 20 seconds holding my stomach, waiting to fall over, like they do in the movies." But he didn't fall down. He walked home. Then he walked to the hospital. The following year, he was playing football again.
He remembers a headline: "Mt. Airy star carries the ball on every play."
McKnight breaks into a cornball grin. "The lead ball, that is."
Some of the bullet fragments he still carries with him today.
In 1943, he graduated from high school. He married his wife, Elsie, two years later, and keeps in his wallet a snapshot of them together on their wedding day. Unlike his disheveled shop, the picture is in pristine condition.
He first worked at a water plant, then installed television antennas. In 1951, he moved to Roanoke to join Leonard Electronics, as a radio and television parts salesman. At the time, he remembers, the big thing was to haul television sets and electric generators up to Mill Mountain to watch the fights being broadcast out of Richmond and Greensboro.
In 1958, he bought out Jim Leonard. Television parts remained a mainstay of his business, as well as antennas and rebuilt picture tubes. At one time, he had eight employees working for him. But in the 1960s, the game changed. Parts got more specialized, less interchangeable. Color sets came in. Rabbit ears and stronger signals curbed the demand for antennas, and the manufacturers started rebuilding their own picture tubes.
"The way TV was going, it was pretty much you either grow or go the other way," McKnight says. "The handwriting was pretty plain." So, in 1968, he went the other way. He closed down the former Leonard Electronics and opened the Albert McKnight Co.
He moved into what had been, over the years, a restaurant and a used-car business and a paint shop and a turkey shoot. And at the dawn of Richard Nixon's presidency, McKnight could boast that he had room enough to spare in his new home.
"When I moved in here, I didn't even have enough to fill the front room."
At first, McKnight didn't know exactly what kind of business he wanted. He thought maybe burglar alarms. "I thought I would go with that because at the time, under burglar alarms in the yellow pages, the only listing was Richmond, and that didn't seem right."
The burglar alarm business didn't pan out. As a one-man operation, McKnight found out he couldn't stay open and go out to install alarms at the same time. So, he looked elsewhere, to CB radios, which were just then coming into vogue.
Repair work followed. He started the first CB club in Virginia. Finally, by the time the movie "Smokey and the Bandit" came out in 1977, the CB craze had kicked into high gear. He was doing more business than he - or his small shop - could handle.
"It mushroomed," he says.
Compouding the problem was McKnight's passion for bartering.
"As long as it didn't eat, I'd trade for anything."
A quick inventory supports his claim. Squirreled away among the clutter are lawn mowers, Christmas ornaments, motorcycles, boxes of flashbulbs, used tires, rings, an antique Frigidaire refrigerator, a 50-year-old Electrolux vacuum cleaner, "adult" Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter dolls, two full cans of Billy Beer, a telescope, a miniature covered wagon and six Elvis radios.
This list only skims the surface, but it poses the obvious questions:
Is there anything he doesn't have?
"I don't know of much," he says.
Does he ever throw anything away?
"I've thrown a lot of stuff away, and gone gotten half of it back before the trashman got here."
Is he a pack rat?
"Absolutely. I can see value in almost anything."
And what if his shop were the size of a Wal-Mart?
"It would be full. I've done found out that the more room I got, the more stuff I got."
The most unusual trade he ever made, he says, was for a pair of knives, a Turkish torture knife and a Persian war knife. The man who traded them to him said they were 300 years old. McKnight scurries off to find them and returns only moments later.
He slides the Turkish torture knife from its sheath to show off its wicked forked blade.
He is a man clearly proud of the collection that surrounds him.
It is amazing, too, how quickly he can find things. Most everything is labeled, and despite the apparent disorder, he says everything has its proper place. "I can pretty much close my eyes and tell you what's on any shelf."
Truthfully, McKnight wishes his shop wasn't so cramped and cluttered. It was just that he got so busy, everything piled up so fast, and spread so rapidly out of his control. He had to surrender.
"I didn't plan this."
Nor does he plan to retire. There are customers to think about - and his way of life.
McKnight's relationship with his customers transcends the ordinary.
He mentioned once to a customer that his shop needed a paint job. "The next week, he pulled up in his van and said anything you don't want covered with paint, you better cover it now." Another customer once noticed his ceiling needed insulation. "He brought a ladder in and started tacking."
Then there was the customer with the drinking problem. McKnight often counseled him about going sober. "I remember him sitting right there in that chair, crying and crying over how he just couldn't control it." That customer stopped by the shop recently to thank McKnight and to tell him he hadn't touched a drink in seven months.
"They're friends," McKnight says. "They ain't customers."
He strikes his familiar pose, leaning on the doorway to his back room.
A customer has come in with a troubled CB. He wants McKnight's trusted advice. Should he repair it, or buy a new one? There is unwavering faith in his question. "I'm gonna leave it up to you," he says.
"No, don't leave it up to me," McKnight answers.
"But you're the one who's the expert."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB