Dave Brast, West Marin’s one-of-a-kind appliance repairman, died on Aug. 4. He was 86 years old.
Dave was driven by a fascination with how things work and a Zen-influenced worldview. He had a degree in fusion physics and once worked for NASA, but he left aerospace behind to pursue the modest life of a down-to-earth handyman. His dexterity with machines translated to skillful classical and flamenco guitar playing, a gift to anyone who heard him play. Dave was a self-reliant character who worked alone and sometimes lived alone. But he was a loyal, nurturing friend, sibling and partner to the people around him.
An Inverness family with a broken stove might not have realized their repairman had helped develop a high-velocity magnetic rail run to simulate the impact of micrometeorites on spacecraft. But Dave’s interest in complex systems influenced all of his work.
His drive to put things together was instinctual. He once told a friend about one of his favorite childhood activities: unraveling a ball of yarn all over the floor just to painstakingly untangle it and roll it back up. “A physicist has infinite chutzpah,” Dave told the Light in a 1979 profile. “He’ll walk up to anything and think he can fix it. He can take the universe apart; why not a little machine?”
Dave was born in 1935 and raised on Chicago’s west side, the oldest child of lower middle-class Jewish parents whose own parents had immigrated from shtetls in present-day Latvia and Romania. He recalled his parents and grandparents speaking Yiddish when they didn’t want to be understood by the youngest generation, something that helped inspire Dave’s lifelong interest in—and aptitude with—foreign languages. He later learned German, Latin and enough Spanish to communicate as a handyman with his Spanish-speaking customers.
Dave’s father, the branch manager of a Western Tire and Auto store, imparted a knack for fixing any household object. But he had trouble relating closely to his children, Dave’s younger brother Neil Brast said, and Dave became a father figure for the younger kids.
When he moved out of the house as a high school senior to study physics at the University of Chicago, and later moved to California to pursue his master’s degree, his younger siblings were devastated. But he often wrote to his sister Susan Brast O’Connell, who was 9 when he left for Berkeley. Susan was learning piano, and would play over the phone for her brother, who would give her feedback.
Dave himself took just a handful of guitar lessons as a young man before teaching himself the rest, delving into works by Bach, Isaac Albéniz and the Paraguayan virtuoso Agustín Barrios Mangoré. He also taught himself to play the harmonica, recorder and ocarina. Dave had a special admiration for Andrés Segovia, the deeply expressive Spanish classical guitarist, whom he once saw perform at Berkeley.
After he earned his physics master’s from Berkeley, Dave worked as a contractor for NASA in San Ramon, working on space vehicles five years before astronauts walked on the moon. Later, he was hired as a mathematician and statistician for Pacific Telephone in San Francisco. AT&T offered him a job, and he could have climbed the corporate ladder. “I decided to go down the ladder instead,” he told the Light in 1979.
Dave’s departure from the white-collar world was politically aligned with the countercultural impulses of the 1960s: he was fired from Pacific Telephone for refusing to shave his beard, and was inspired to work for himself by the hippies who extolled the virtues of baking one’s own bread, growing one’s own vegetables and fixing one’s own Volkswagen.
After a spell as a computer programmer for the University of California in 1970, he left the East Bay, following his then-girlfriend Melinda Minor to Inverness.
Dave’s first job as a handyman was building a ramp for a disabled friend’s home. His commitment to his lifestyle—making just enough money to get by, acquiring little, repairing broken machines that would otherwise have to be replaced—was partly political. He was a pacifist, active in the anti-nuclear movement, and he reviled the handiwork of some of his fellow physicists. He later became something of an online activist, frequently posting petitions and articles during the Trump era and helping organize protests on Facebook.
“Dave was one of those people who gave me confidence that people who could design and build nuclear power plants and weapons of mass destruction could also repair the stoves and refrigerators in his own community, which he did, with humor and humility,” said his friend Mark Dowie.
But Dave also repaired things simply because he loved the work, leaving detailed notes for customers about what was broken, how he had diagnosed the problem, and what he’d done to fix it. “His technique owes as much to the scientific method as to any repair manual,” Light columnist Elizabeth Ptak wrote after reading some of his diagnostic accounts.
In the 1990s, Dave shared a rented house in Seahaven with his partner Jen Lovejoy, a photographer and artist. Both had remarkable intellects and shared a love for the seclusion and natural beauty of West Marin. Dave and another former partner of Jen’s, Jim Wessel, got to know each other as Jen struggled with breast cancer and chemotherapy throughout their relationship. When she died in 2004, Dave and Jim grew closer.
Though Dave could be acerbic and stubbornly opinionated, Jim said, he was also deeply patient and had an “almost brotherly” bond with his friend, “especially when the chips were down.”
When Dave had a stroke a few years ago, Jim was the first person he called. Dave had hearing and vision trouble and chronic kidney disease, and withdrew somewhat toward the end of his life, but he still spoke regularly with Jim and Susan. When he stopped working, he kept his weekly ad running in the Light, and would chat with would-be customers about their appliance troubles, dispensing advice even when he couldn’t perform the repairs himself. After he didn’t respond to his sister’s calls for a few days in early August and hadn’t posted on Facebook, Susan knew something was wrong. Dave’s landlord found his body in his Inverness Park apartment, where he had died in his sleep.
Dave was active with several West Marin community nonprofits. His family said he would be honored by donations in his name to the Community Land Trust Association of West Marin, Papermill Creek Children’s Corner, the Dance Palace Community Center, the West Marin Scholarship Program, the Coastal Health Alliance, the American Civil Liberties Union or the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Dave is survived by his sister, Susan, his brother, Neil, his uncle Alvin Harris and four nieces and nephews. He is preceded in death by his parents, his sister Roberta Brast Lurie, his aunts and uncles, and his partner, Jen.