Interview by Lily Shaver. The interview took place on March 22, 2024. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Carl Prokop, age 88, owned Prokop’s TV Sales and Services for around 63 years. He started around 1956 and retired in 2019. Later he sold his shop that was on Main Street in Estacada.

1. How long have you lived in the Estacada area?

Well, we came from South Dakota in 1943. My parents lived in Nebraska and South Dakota. The grasshoppers in South Dakota would eat the vegetation and the wind would blow, taking off the top soil. My Dad was in the first World War. When Pearl Harbor happened my Dad came home from work and he said, “World, we’re at war.” That’s when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. So Dad came to Portland to work in the shipyards here. We had moved to a little town, Malin, Oregon [near Klamath Falls]. But he sold that place and came to Portland. And we as kids and my Mom went back to South Dakota to her home. Her brother owned the place that she grew up on. 

But anyhow, when Dad bought this place in Estacada…In those days you had stamps to get gas, you couldn’t just go to the station and get gas you had just so many stamps to get gas on. So when he was working in the shipyards, Dad was sort of a carpenter, mechanic, (and so am I). And so he found this place in Estacada listed for sale and he bought it. Of course we came back on a train from South Dakota in 1943. I started the third grade in Estacada. It was Estacada Grade School. Then from the third grade on I graduated in 1953. When I was in high school the National Guard came out recruiting, and I got talked into joining the National Guard, so I was in the National Guard from 1953 to 1962, for nine years. 

2. How did you get started with TV repair work?

When I graduated from high school all the TVs had just started to come out, and there was an ad in the paper, “Go to school and learn how to repair,” well I was, you know, farm kids, they’re always doing stuff. So my Dad worked on car motors and it was easy. So I was going to school and started working. Well there was a guy, Bob Newman, who was working on TV sets in the hardware store, but he was never around, he hit the bottle too much. They started calling me at home and I was already working with radios and stuff and so they’d call me and have a bunch of people that needed their TVs fixed, so I’d go around, and a lot of that was just changing the tubes. So by then I was changing little resistors and compassers and components, so I started doing it and I ended up running it because Newman decided he was an alcoholic and wouldn’t take the cure, so I ran the thing, and I just ended up taking over. So there I was, that was probably about 1956. 

3. Where was your first shop located? 

At that time the shop was in the back of a hardware store. Newman had a building on Broadway Street, and he built a new building right on the corner which is Dollar General now. He had a building there and then the TV thing was in the back room. The building was the hardware store and then it was an empty parking lot, and the alley that runs back across towards City Hall and back on towards Thriftway [Harvest Market], that alley that runs back in there. And it ran right clean through, well, this building, I heard it was for sale, so I bought it. It was what they call the old Post Office. I had some money saved up so I bought it. I moved, instead of being in the back corner of this hardware store, that way I had a lot more room, I had my own place, I guess. Of course I was working on TV sets. 

4. What’s the history behind the location of the former Safari Club in Estacada?

Well then, in the meantime there was a Sportsmen Club on Broadway Street, and it burned. And so they built a building next to this hardware store on that parking lot (which is where Dollar General is now), and it was right next to the alley. And so then the rumor was that he was going to change the name to Safari Club, and it was Sportsmen Club. And then there was some dealing, there were some guys from Nevada, and the guy who owned the Sportsmen Club decided to trade businesses or something, and so I don’t know, I think there were some problems there. Whatever their problem was, I don’t know, but anyway, all of a sudden, Glen Park, who used to own the saw mill, (there’s no saw mill there anymore)… Anyway, Glen Park had a second mortgage on that building. So he hadn’t paid the second mortgage off because the first mortgage holder would have taken it to your second mortgage, and it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. So anyhow, Glen Park ended up taking over this, it was the Sportsmen Club then. And of course he used to go on, like to Africa on hunting trips through, just you know, wild animal stuff. So then the rumor was that he was going to change the name to Safari Club, which is what happened. 

5. How does this history connect with your shop?

Well, what happened see, I owned this building right across the alley from that, and course he [Glen Park] had a lot of money, because he sold to Crown and Zellerbach. And anyhow, so he wanted to expand, and he wanted to close the alley down so he could expand that much. Well, he could only get half of the alley, some way with their laws or something, and so I was supposed to have the other half of the alley. And so he wanted to buy me out, because I was next door. And there were some other buildings beside me too. There was a laundromat, and a guy had a barber shop there. When the guy who had the barber shop told me he was going to quit, he wanted to know if I wanted to buy the building, and I should have bought it, but I didn’t. Because then some gal put in a Sears store for a while. So anyway he bought up the whole thing where the yogurt shop is [Yo Treats]. At that time, the yogurt shop was an empty lot too. The hardware store was also the liquor store. So they moved it to where the yogurt shop is and that beauty shop, Backyard Beauty Collective.

When Park bought out my building so that he could expand his Safari Club, the building on the corner used to be Bartholomew’s Grocery and Feed Store. They were old timers, and actually I was on a service call one time for a guy named Sagner and he was telling me that his dad built the store for Bartholomew’s dad. And so that would have been around the turn of the century, from 1899 to 1900. But anyway, it was for sale, so I bought it, so I could keep my TV repair going. 

6. Who did you do business with? Where did they come from? What types of repairs did you do?

I had people coming from all over: Colton, Molalla, Boring, Sandy, Toledo. I did work for a lot of people, probably more out of town than in town. I used to do service calls, and I covered a lot of territory. I’d have people calling me when their TV would go out, well, they’d call, and of course I did home service, so I’d go there. I did quite a bit of work at Three Lynx and Ripplebrook Ranger Station. I worked on television up there, trying to get a signal, which wasn’t very good. Now with the satellites you can get it. Course all these new sets now, they are harder to fix than the house, and most of the time you break the screen or…And now all the parts places, the parts, I used to buy parts from places, now they closed down because TV repair is sort of a history thing. I used to change the little parts, the transistors and resistors, capacitors, and repair broken circuits, and then you have to troubleshoot and find where the trouble is and fix it.

But now you don’t change little parts because everything’s surface, it takes a special machine, because it’s soldered in, and you gotta have the tools to do that. And to do that it’s spendy and it’s not worth it for a little town. And even in big town, even for big repairs in Portland, they’re folding up. Even some of the big parts places that I used to get out of California, back East, and around even there, they quit. The heck of it is, people are almost forced to buy new TV’s, because the back lights, when they go out,..well there’s a place still in business in Minnesota I think where you can get the LED strips. I mean you can replace those, but there’s several springs you’ve got to take apart and they’re so thin, that if that screen breaks, you can’t get screens, that’s impossible if a screen breaks on a TV, it’s not worth fixing. The only way to fix it is if you have two sets of the same kind and one’s got other problems and the screen’s okay, that’s the only way you can fix them, it’s like a wrecking yard for parts.

7. What would you want newcomers to know about Estacada?

It’s changed a lot, because if you go up Regan Hill that used to be—they used to say that there’s never gonna be houses there because that hill’s too steep. Because if there’s a fire, the fire trucks couldn’t pull that hill that fast and whatnot. And then of course all your new motors and you got more power.

It wasn’t that long ago that the Safari Club building was removed and replaced with The Dollar General in Estacada. Read all about it in this article from the Estacada News: 

Lions and Tigers and Bears…Oh My! | News | estacadanews.com 

Glen Park was born in 1911 and died 2001. For more information him visit this link:

Microsoft Word – PARK, GLEN E..doc (worldforestry.org)