Peter Lindenmuth

Peter is a lot of things: a retired tube radio engineer, a self-taught mechanical engineer, an artist, and a friend to the disenfranchised worker.
That's mostly it. A friend to the disenfranchised worker.



I used to be a tube radio engineer. That's the way I started out. All through high school, all through college, finally graduated with an electrical degree in engineering.

While I was in college, I had a job working at a radio station, ... building audio equipment for the radio station. This was back in 1949-50, many years ago. And, I got a brief shot at being a radio announcer in a small Southern town, Gainsville, FL. Two-hundred and fifty [watts]! That's quite a few stations around that are only two-hundred and fifty watts. You can cover a fair sized town with that.

When I finally graduated, I worked for a company, no longer in existence, of course: the National Company. And within a year, I was given to be a project engineer. They wanted to get into high fidelity and that's the only thing I really knew, was high Fidelity, designing amplifiers and things like that. So I got that job... That used to be over in Malden. And their specialty really used to be communications receivers for ham radio operators, but they also did a lot of military work. I was high fidelity only. I was not a ham. They were just starting out. They had done contract work for the Navy, for the Army. And my first job with them, the first year, was working on Navy receivers, naval equipment, in other words. And then they started to get into high fidelity and they gave me that job of making the first amplifier. And that was some of the prototypes up there... 1953 about, 1954, long time ago. And then the transistor came along, and I didn't like the transistor.

About that time I got fed up the people in hi-fi. They were all too cliquish and more or less confined to believing this or believing that. I saw that the artists were a lot better people, socially. After all, I came from an artistic family. My mother: artist. My sister, grandfather. So they made their living, the family made their living with art. And I was an engineer. My grandfather was a photographer. A well known photographer in Allentown, PA. This was AGES ago. He was well known as a portrait photographer there....



Well even before when I stated to get involved in that [art], at the age of 14, a year after I started high school, I got involved working for a shop in Bear Skin Neck, Rockport, Mass. My parents were living there in the summertime. In the wintertime, we were in St. Augustine, Florida. So anyway, there was a shop there that made handcraft items out of pewter and copper and things like that in the so-called "art-metal style". This was the style of metal that the craftsmen were working on in the 20s and 30s. So that's where I learned hammering of metal, introduction to shop work, really, a limited kind of shop work. Pounding, soldering particularly was important particularly. Welding. Things like that. So I knew how to do a lot of shop work. I didn't know how to use a lathe, didn't know how to use a milling machine. But then as a result of taking an engineering course in college, I knew drafting and things like that. And I decided, I was soon getting into this, while I was working. In the evenings. while I was working in the job as a tube engineer, high fidelity. So after about a couple, two and a half years, I met some friends, a couple of girlies.



I sort of eased into the art. By the time I quit [being a tube radio engineer] I and a couple of these girlies who I met... The girlies rented a place over in Gloucester, Mass from an aged Harvard man. And he said, "you gals can't get a job in town, but there's big money in tile-top tables and I happen to have the pottery that my wife used to run and that I used to run. I'll teach you how to run big tile-top tables, but you've got to get somebody to weld up the outside of the table and put the legs on them."

And they said, "Oh well, we know Peter. He knows how to do that." Well, sure enough, I did know. So right away we were sort of instantly in the business of building tile-top tables. He had the pottery to make the tiles, decorate the tiles, actually. I knew friends who were artists who could decorate the tiles. I could do the welding on the table's bases. So we worked on that from that fall, all the way through winter, until it came time to sell them. My parents had this place in Rockport which they had this summer gallery at. They were selling paintings from the gallery in the front, and the back of the place had a beautiful view of the harbor. Great backyard. The first thing we did was make a tile-top selling table in the backyard. And that was quite successful.

Oh, I did have to go back to work. Not with National, but with a different company. As a mechanical engineer. I called myself a mechanical engineer at that point. I just gave up the electronics completely, because I really found the mechanical engineering was A LOT more inviting. Visual fun, see. And so I got a new job doing mechanical design, working for an electronics company. Because I knew how radio tubes and things like that are put together. I was designing the mechanical part.

So then I stayed in that and gradually built up a machine shop while I was working. In the evenings I built up a machine shop. That was in Boston, 82 Charles St, right across from The Sevens [a pub.] I was there with an art gallery in the front and a machine shop in the back. It was originally called just the Nexus Gallery and then when I left that place, when the rent went up, after about 12 years, I went over to Stanhope Street, where there were a bunch of printers, artists.


Click for larger size

That is what I was doing in those days, 1955, 1954, something like that. Next 15 years. I've got all of this stuff together, but I'm just having trouble remembering all of these dates exactly. When I moved from 82 Charles Street into 27 Stanhope Street. A group also called the Experimental Etching Studio. They rented space, had a press there. My friend had a tile shop there. There were a bunch of lofts, 27, 26, etc. The bottom shop is where the tile shops were, Stanhope Framers. Up above that was the machine shop that I had. And the etching studio and a place called "Impressions Workshop." We were all in this group of three buildings.

[IMGL]http://rutt.smugmug.com/photos/530849366_QVg8y-L.jpg[/IMGL]
Was full of artists, printers, you know, people who made etchings, block prints, things like that. Copper plate etchings, mainly. Lithographs was the other thing. While I was over there I was manufacturing etching presses. It's a kind of a crude job. I didn't really like it, but it paid well. Guaranteed money, you know... I was doing that in the shop with a lot of equipment I have downstairs.

And then came the opportunity to move out into my own space. This place became available. So I made a bid for it. Got it. So I own this place, that's right. Been here for about 20 some odd years. I think it was 1984 as I recall that I got this place. It's been thoroughly depreciated and the mortgage has been paid. At the moment [I own] four other buildings in Boston. This building, the building in back, two buildings on Beacon Hill. There's one building over there, the one that I'm selling, was my first acquisition, I paid $38 thousand for it. Now I'm getting bids for $680 thousand. And now, right in back of you, is an appraisal. He thinks it's worth 900 and some odd thousand dollars. But it's falling apart. I neglected it. I didn't... I'm a lousy landlord. The tenants are the ones who wore it out. Time will do it. But tenants will do it, too.
[This place] is pretty much as we bought it. Very little has been changed. Haven't changed any of the partitions on the inside. They were all pretty much as they were when it was selling religious items... That's right statues and stuff. I bought it; had a good collection of statues and stuff inside. We gave a great many of them away by just putting them outside, encouraging the public to come after them. Some of them were used for religious purposes. One guy really wanted to take home as much stuff as he could. He was working on his house and this was good what they called "praydo"... and other religious things that are used in churches for kneeling and praying and stuff like that. They had a collection of them upstairs.

I had a guy over there, I couldn't bear to throw out, I'd known him for so long. And he stayed there and finally he got really sick. And he was going over to the hospital, Mass General. He was going to take a shower, not a shower but a bath. And the bath tub was underneath the slopping deck like that and he was a big boy and it was an ordinary tub. And he got stuck in the tub. So they had to call the emergency medical. And the emergency medical couldn't get him out, couldn't get him unstuck from the sides of the tub. So they had the fire department over there, and they took their axes to the sides of the cast iron tub and broke the tub and got him out. Two or three minutes after they got him out and were taking him downstairs, he died on the stretcher. About 4-5 years ago.

And then I've got another guy, he's basically a Harvard trained architect, no MIT trained architect. And you know the architecture profession is absolutely zero, the worst trade you can be in. Even when the were building things... The schools turn out far more architects because it's thought to be a far more glamorous, far more better paying profession than it really is. So this guy has been in one the apartments that I'm selling. And he hasn't paid in 2 years. Well, he takes me over the hospital sometimes, that's worth something...