It wasn’t too long ago that repairmen started disappearing. Like telephone booths, Polaroid cameras and drive-in movie theaters, they were nearly gone before we had a chance to notice their absence, because most of us had already stopped looking for them.

But a handful of them are still in Honolulu, fixing the stuff we continue to break, and simply by their survival, holding out against an increasingly disposable culture.

In the mid-1940s, Tony Gonzalez put off his dream of becoming a trumpet player or boxer to learn the trade and never turned back. Today, he and his wife Hazel operate T & H Leatherwear and Shoe Repair, a little store in Chinatown that reeks of leather and rubber cement, where he has been repairing shoes for the people of this island for half a century.

Gonzalez has a grey caterpillar of a mustache clinging to his upper lip and he spends his days surrounded by stacks of thick soles, nylon heels and scraps of hides. He said his industry has transformed into something unrecognizable since the 1960s, when there were scores of cobblers working in Honolulu.

“It’s a dying trade,” he said. “Nobody wants to go into it anymore. Fifty years ago, you could open a shop in a neighborhood and provide for your family. When I opened my shop in 1959, with the amount of money I would gross in just one weekend, just Saturday and Sunday, I could pay my rent at home and at the shop. Now I have a smaller shop and in a weekend of business I can barely pay the utilities on the house.”

He said that the quality of shoes being made is worse than ever, but people don’t want to take the time to repair them.

“Even the big names that used to be really good–Bally, Cole Haan, they have come down in quality,” he said. “They charge $400 for a pair of these shoes, but it’s getting to the point where the soles, moldy soles we call them, are being made of plastic because it takes oil to make rubber. They do not last.”

For the $50 he charges for re-soling and re-stitching, Gonzalez said he can make a pair of shoes better than new. But the mentality of an instant-gratification society means people aren’t willing to wait for what they want.

“Everybody wants everything in an instant and manufacturers will compromise quality to give it to them,” he said. “People don’t have patience. We are too wasteful, and part of it is that some people think what they have isn’t repairable. They’re amazed when they come in and see what I’ve done. Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes you improvise, but nothing is impossible.”

Across town, Alan Nielsen has made a life out of preserving the era when Gonzalez and his ilk were thriving in Honolulu. When he’s not diving in faraway oceans or traveling to exotic locales to film everything from Komodo dragons to tigers raised by monks in Thai monasteries, the 54-year-old adventure seeker runs a tiny shop in Kane’ohe called Affordable Image, that you’d probably never find if you weren’t looking for it (and maybe even if you were).

His second-floor set-up is a mini technology museum, filled with clunky cameras, large reels, projectors, cassettes and other equipment that Nielsen proves isn’t yet obsolete. Customers come to him with 90-year-old recordings, 16-millimeter film and bits of audio and video that they don’t even know how to watch or listen to anymore, and Nielsen updates it to a current format. He’ll also piece together footage for those who don’t want to undertake a painstaking editing process themselves.

“We’re in the business of saving history,” he said. “We just did a project for Punahou and caught a glimpse of Barry Obama. It was a video yearbook from 1978, and he came right up and waved at the camera during gym class.”

Nielsen has repeatedly come across rare footage of now-famous people. His favorite came from a collection of World War II era footage a local woman brought to him of her husband’s Air Force training in Chicago in the 1940s.

“They were training these pilots at Wrigley Field in Chicago, before sending them off to war, and the footage shows these guys outside of Wrigley, just clowning around by the train tracks,” he said. “So one of these guys puts his hat on sideways, and he’s smoking a pipe and he salutes with the wrong hand, you know, because he’s just with his buddies. This guy happened to be Jimmy Stewart.”

All kinds of Elvis Presley footage comes through the shop, and Nielsen has also worked with video and photographs of John F. Kennedy when he was in Hawai’i two weeks before his assassination. He’s watched film of Jimmy Hendrix performing at Crater Fest in the 1960s, and heard recordings of Auntie Genoa Keawe (before she was known as Auntie Genoa), on a record label called 49th State Records, the owners of which assumed Hawai’i would be granted statehood before Alaska. But never-before-seen footage of celebrities isn’t what fascinates Nielsen the most.

“The really neat stuff is the ancient film from the Big Island in the 1920s,” he said. “Like these guys in a rowboat who got this shark that’s bigger than the boat. We saw them taking cattle with rope into the water to hoist it out. We’ve also seen 100 years of volcanoes that were just fantastic. Talk about dangerous. The people would get unbelievably close with their cameras. The Kapaho eruption is outstanding–it’s just curtains of fire.”

Given the rapid technological changes that have transformed society over the past decade alone–from YouTube to camera cell phones and digital technology–more people are recording history than ever and a mind-blowing amount of technology is being discarded as a result. By one group’s count, at least 400 million pieces of technology–cell phones, cameras, what have you–are chucked each year.

“Unfortunately, this is the sign of capitalism,” Nielsen said. “But our disposable economy is for economy’s sake and it doesn’t affect history as far as I can see. With more people and better technology there are more stories to tell and better ways to capture them.

The only limit is Earth’s resources and our use of them, but the disposable mentality doesn’t–and really cannot–hurt the stories.”

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