so, who is the real mr. fxr of hattiesburg?! before we answer that, let’s look at some others that pop up. the purpose of this post is to help funnel all those different spellings that people use to the right place when they need to look me up.

many times, even close friends or family, still call me mr. fixit. i guess that it comes from mr. fixit fox of the childhood cartoon animation busytown, which aired from 1994 to 1997.

from their wiki, it’s spelled mr. fixit, but i’ve also seen it spelled mr. fix it as well. i’ve seen that he appears as early as 1966 in Richard Scarry’s Best Picture Dictionary Ever.

and then there is mr. fixer the black martial arts mechanic superhero from rook city of sentinals of the multiverse also seen spelled as mister fixer. mister fixer the home remodeler in central iowa. the mr. fixer who is marketing windshield repair kits. there is a DIY youtube channel known as mrfixitDIY.

even though we reincarnated the mr. fxr name in 2009 for repairing electronic devices, mainly apple iphones and ipads – i decided to make it official and purchased the website URL from another mr. fxr in 2012. this was a licensed contractor in another state that didn’t seem to be in business any longer. whatever the reason, he sold me his URL and we created an official website. you can check out his old website from the web archive.

and then there is the jazz song entitled mister fixer by doug blake from the album blake ‘n’ blue from 1997.

truth is, the spelling i chose came from a desire to rhyme and condense for ease of entering in a URL. mister and fixer rhyme – mister fix it doesn’t. and fxr is fixer with the vowels removed. so the url is a condensed version of mister and a condensed form of fixer and they rhyme. www.mrfxr.com

i first adopted the name with the first incarnation of a repair business back during my optical stage of my work history. my first vocation out of college was as an optician and people broke their glasses. i owned a micro torch and had developed the skills needed to solder their broken glasses back together and decided to start a business. that business worked for awhile, but i eventually moved on to other things and no longer repaired glasses as i had moved on to other things.

i’m sure i originally adopted and coopted the mr. fxr name originally earned by my late uncle clifford. he was known in his community of dexter, mo as “mister fix it” as mentioned by his daughter that he could “fix anything”. i don’t remember much, only he had a comfortable chair and the shed seemed like more of a man cave than a shed. if i remember right there was a small fridge with some handy beverages available. i remember he had a rather largish shed around the back of his house and seemed to be there most of the time. since he was there most of the time, i guess people would pop in whenever and i guessed that he probably spent time out there to have some sort of alone time. so he had a red light installed that went way up to the top of a nearby tree. when the red light was on, he was accepting visitors. not on? come back when it’s on. at least that is my recollection. my aunt and cousins can set me straight if they see this blog post. you can see the shed at the 5:00 minute mark in the video below.

it was only at his funeral, and the eulogy given by his daughter, my cousin that brought back those earlier memories that i had forgotten. that he was known as mister fix it. i must have been influenced by that to have adopted that name.

that being said, uncle clifford was probably the catalyst for me choosing the name, but at to the real core of some one being an influence in my abilities has to be credited to his brother, my dad don. my dad always seemed to have a knack for fixing things as well. a real troubleshooter. solved many hard issues working in the dexter area for at&t. dad taught me how to solder and gave me my first irons and fluxes. his workshop in the basement contained all kinds of parts, tools, damp basement smells combined with smell of cedar shavings. parts, bits of wood, and various forms of incandescent and neon lighting hung from the unfinished ceiling. i not only learned how to solder, but turn wood on an old belt driven lathe. that lathe also had a scroll saw. nearby was a large vise for holding things. bench top grinder with wire brush on one side. old motorcycles/ parts of go carts in boxes we had worked on cluttering the area. an old electronics experiment kit sat in a corner next to a small wooden toy excavator we had “built together” for little me out of wooden dowels and 2×4’s and a plastic bucket.

i can remember the sound of the creaking of the stairs as i bounded 2 at a time up or down to the red painted concrete floor and rounded the corner into that “messy” shop. can you really consider it a shop if it is too tidy? that shop and my dad was the real catalyst for my love of “tinkering” and getting more life out of something i owned that had been broken. repairing something (to me) seems to give respect to the builder and to the time and real cost of owning something. a large portion of my life has been an era of “disposable”. if it is broken, just throw it away and buy another. trouble was, i have never felt that kind of freedom with my hard earned money. and i really don’t think many of you do either. and it’s possibly why you are here reading this blog post to the very end. dad, and his love of tinkering and repairing, has taught me the value of a good fix. not many people have that gift. but it seems that i have had some great people in my life that did and hope to have adopted some of that ability.

and that is the real core of who mr. fxr is today.