If you own a snowblower, a chain saw, a string trimmer or any number of other small machines to keep your place up, chances are you know Kurt Jillson. He’s the bushy-bearded red-headed guy in a baseball cap who is always up, always cheery, always working in the basement at Brown and Roberts Hardware Store on Main Street in Brattleboro.
Kurt was born in 1972 and grew up on the family farm just across from the old Regional Library on Rte. 5 in Dummerston where his sister Bonnie and their mother Marilyn still live. (Bonnie was a diligent student of this writer when he was an English teacher at BUHS in the early 1980’s).
When Kurt was in the third grade in Dummerston, his teachers realized he had dyslexia and learned in ways different from his fellow students. To teach him how to tell time, for example, his teacher sent him home one afternoon with a wind-up clock (even though the clock was not working) asking him to learn what he could about telling time from turning the various dials.
Kurt messed around with the clock and ended up taking it apart to see how it worked. When he took it back to school the next day, he gave it back to his teacher pointing out a broken spring in its workings. “If you replace that spring, that clock will work again.” It did.
Each day, when Kurt got home from Dummerston Central School and later BUHS, he helped his Dad do the chores on the farm. His father also worked as a mechanic, both at Rod’s gas-station in Putney as well as Agway repairing milklines, grain augers and gutter cleaners for farmers in the area. Kurt often went along, learning as he went, always paying attention to how machines worked.
In the late 80’s Kurt studied mechanics through the vocational program at BUHS, focusing mainly on small machine repair. As part of his training, he worked a couple days a week at Brown and Roberts (B&R) under Sylvio “Shorty” Forrett, a local legend in small machine repair, down there in the basement. (Shorty had worked at B&R for years even before Bernard Putnam bought the hardware store in 1973 (when it was in The Brooks Building) and the family moved the business - with Shorty - in 1974 120’ north on Main Street into what had been The Montgomery Ward Building.) Even today, Kurt displays a photo in his home (see attached photo) of him and Shorty taken in 1991 when they began to work together at B&R.
Kurt remembers Shorty telling him, “If you start a job and you like it, learn as much as you possibly can in all directions so you see the whole picture.”
“That worked for me. I’m nosy. I want to know everything about what I do.”
Shorty left around 1993 when he reached the age of 75 and Kurt took over his role as the key man repairing chain saws, lawn mowers, equipment with two-stroke engines….. Just after 9/11 he moved to Oregon and took a job repairing Stihl chainsaws in a Mom and Pop operation for awhile but “I lost contact with the people I knew in Brattleboro AND there was no Lester Dunklee out there. I came home.” Now, as he told me, “As long as everything is in place, I’ve gotten ten or eleven saws going again in a day. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love it. I have fun. I solve problems.”
Kurt arrives at B&W at 6:30AM and leaves every afternoon at 4:00PM. He drives north up Rte. 5 a couple miles or so to the farm where he grew up. His sister Bonnie lives there with their mom Marilyn. He milks and feeds the one remaining Jersey cow (Bonnie processes the milk), fills the outdoor firebox, does a few chores and then heads to Brookline where he lives with his wife Leeann and their 10 year old son Kol. He’s home around 7:00, has dinner with his family, plays with his son and then “the alarm goes off at 4:00 AM.”
I asked Kurt what he did when he wasn’t working: “I play with my son, and we take things apart and put them back together.”
“Do you ever not work?”
“Well, in summer, I take a day off here and there to hay for my Mom and sister, mowing beautiful rectangles in the field and then we get the hay in on the weekend if the weather’s right. In summer, I hay at the farm. That’s my time off.”
Ed Morse, who also was an English student of this writer at BUHS in the early 80’s, started working at B&R in 1986 and is now its manager. I asked Ed about Kurt: “Kurt’s always the guy you want to pass a question by. His knowledge is way beyond small machines. And he’s the younger brother I never had. He’s had numerous surgeries on his back and neck. Even if either hurts, he’ll be the first to volunteer to unload a delivery truck and THEN go home. And nobody knows more about this building built by Montgomery Ward in the 30’s. He’s the one who keeps it running.”
Ed went on to say that “being an ACE store, we hand out customer surveys. Kurt gets more replies than any of us here, like: “That red-headed guy is the basement went above and beyond….’
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.