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By Jay King
Staff Writer
Carrying on a family tradition of taking up lamp repair after retirement, Greer’s Butch Austin continues to practice a type of mechanical medicine for lights that have gone dim.
He cautions anyone in need of lighting repair to bring the lamp with them but to take one time-saving precaution before you come: check the bulb.
“You’d be surprised how many we get in that all they needed was a new bulb,” said Austin’s wife, Sandra. “We had two in just this week.”
The couple runs the lighting repair business out of a shop behind their Beechwood Drive home. He does the delicate work of coaxing new life out of light fixtures old and new while she keeps the books and orders the various and sundry parts such a varied occupation requires.
Austin took over the business upon his retirement from a career as a U.S. Army chaplain from the previous “Lamp Doctor,” Austin’s uncle, Richard Wall. Wall ran the business, which he started in 1950 with his brother, Alvin Wall, in the Old Red Barn on Wade Hampton Boulevard where the Lowe’s is now located.
Austin assumed the lamp repair mantle full time in 2004 and has been repairing just about every type of lighting fixture imaginable amid a growing trend of manufacturers designing their products to be disposed of and replaced rather than maintained and repaired. Fixing lamps and the like has become something of a lost art with Austin, being one of only a handful of specialists who can breathe new life into old lamps.
For the rest of the story, read the Middle Tyger Times.
Photo by Mandy Ferguson
Carrying on a family tradition dating back more than 60 years, Greer’s Butch Austin is one of the few people in the Upstate who specializes in lamp and lighting repairs and is known as the “Lamp Doctor.”
Here he is working on repairing a crystal chandelier that fell more than 25 feet onto a foyer’s floor.
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