They are an exhausted, ragtag army in the war against dirt, cat hair and dust balls. Outfitted in blue, red, green, yellow, black and white, they bear the standards of Hoover, Eureka, Sharp, Miele, Panasonic, Kirby, Royal and Electrolux. One hundred seventy not-so-strong, they crowd the showroom of the Denver Filter Queen.
The vacuum cleaners crammed in here await Bill Eichman’s Midas touch one last time.
For nearly four decades, Eichman has done his part to make sure that cleanliness – if not next to godliness – at least ran a close second.
Now 63, he’s phasing out his repair and sales business. Thing is, as soon as his customers found out, they hauled in vacuum cleaners by the dozens. Ergo the 170 used machines that will consume all of his shop’s floor space and all of his time for the next several weeks.
Despite a wooden sign on his office wall inscribed “Mayor Bill, Tennyson Colorado,” Eichman has never held political office. But he has held sway at the corner of 43rd and Tennyson streets in northwest Denver since 1969.
One of the metro area’s most arcane collections of belts and bags, along with a bodacious inventory of spare parts, provides the sales volume at this vacuum Valhalla, but it’s personal attention that brings people back.
“He’s got everything you need,” said 30-year customer Jerry Haselgren, who ducked in Friday to pick up a “U bag for a Dirt Devil.” “Good chatter. This is a nice place to come.”
When Mayor Bill, whom Westword once billed as “the best friend a vac uum cleaner ever had,” pointed Haselgren to a sign that announced Eichman wasn’t accepting any more repair jobs, Haselgren erupted:
“You can’t retire. This is traumatic stuff. Where am I going to go?”
Probably someplace where the conversation isn’t as good.
“I talk to everybody,” Eichman said. Customer service “is only hard if you’re a sourpuss. I like people.”
He grew up in the neighborhood, went to Holy Family Catholic elementary and high schools, then graduated from nearby Regis University.
Not long after he got his business and accounting degree, Eichman joined his dad at the Denver Filter Queen. His father was going blind from an eye disease and asked his son to help sell and repair the once-popular line of Filter Queen vacuum cleaners.
“I was mechanically inclined,” Eichman said. “I worked on cars, built hot rods. My dad was getting to where he couldn’t see. But he still wanted to tinker around.”
His father tinkered until a heart attack forced the elder Eichman to retire. By then, his son was hooked.
“They say whatever you do, if you don’t like it, find something else,” Eichman said. “I never looked for another job.”
He did, however, branch out into repairs of every brand of vacuum cleaner. He tried to do it sociably as the area around his shop changed from a working-class Italian neighborhood of homeowners to Hispanic renters to a newfound gentrification.
The arrival of young people now forking out hundreds of thousands of bucks for houses isn’t necessarily good news for Eichman.
Old people get things fixed when they break. Young people throw things away.
That’s not a slam, Eichman quickly pointed out. It’s a matter of “economic feasibility.”
“If you buy a $49 vacuum cleaner,” he explained, “a $29 labor charge (if it breaks) pretty much does you in.”
Eichman swears that time has not done him in. Even though he worked six days a week until a few years ago, he now expects to spend his days restoring his own antique vacuum cleaners.
That is if he can dodge 36 years’ worth of adoring customers.
“I’ll find a little hole in the wall,” he said, looking at the vacuum cleaners stuffed into his shop, “where no one knows where I am.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
