Partway through the airing of a Phillies game on a local radio station, there is a break for an ad.
Brenda Powell has a question: "Does your vacuum suck?"
If it doesn't, she wants to have a look at it. She can fix it.
It's been nearly 25 years since she left her nursing job for the marvels of modern suction technology. Thousands of vacuum cleaners have succumbed to her determination and her simple delight in working with tools.
"I like to make things work right," Powell says, shrugging.
Finding her shop wouldn't be easy - she likes plants, so the display windows are a tangle of greenery and flowers instead of vacuum cleaners - except that it has been in the same location on Market Street in downtown West Chester since 1939, so most people know it by now.
That was when Charles McCardle opened what was then an appliance repair shop. Powell doesn't think he did vacuums then. After all, vacuums had only been around since about 1907, when an American inventor sold his patent for a small electric cleaner to a harness maker named Hoover.
Over the years, other kinds of appliance repair declined - it became cheaper and easier to buy new - and McCardle began to work more and more on vacuums.
Powell, years later, was cleaning houses and working as a nursing assistant.
But she always harbored a love of tinkering. She even took two vo-tech courses, aiming to become an electrician's apprentice.
"I just wanted to work with tools," she said.
Time passed. She started cleaning house for McCardle's son. After she did a few simple repairs on their lamps and such - she'd discover they weren't working and just fix them - McCardle's son approached her.
His father was 65 and he needed help, the younger McCardle said. Was Powell interested?
She spent a few weekends in the shop. McCardle showed her a few motors. It was 1982.
Not long after, he had a special repair table built for her - just five feet tall, she needed a low one - and the two worked together for the next 18 years.
When McCardle finally retired, Powell and her husband, Ron, bought the business and renamed it Brenda's Vac Shop.
Inside, Powell reigns over several rooms full of vacuums and parts that look almost like they belong in a museum.
A sturdy, no-nonsense woman of 51 who wears her hair in a bun, she walks down aisles of small cardboard bins, still labeled in McCardle's writing: Hoover handle spring lever. Eureka express neck. Hoover celebrity swivel hose.
