Good times and family ties: Michaud’s Market draws generations of locals

About Town: Kloberdans pays tribute to grandfather with camera repair shop

David Kloberdans runs his camera repair business out of his home. Sandwiched between a store filled with found items called “Ed’s Stuff” and a residential area, 16 Hall Road looks like any other house, large and painted white. What lies inside, a collected life, is far from ordinary.A little more than 30 years ago, Kloberdans settled here with his wife, a Bath native, after their daughter passed away in his native Colorado.
“It was really, really hard for my wife to stay [in Colorado], so she wanted to go back home.”A former undercover police officer, Kloberdans began repairing cameras after a doctor recommended he take up a hobby to relieve stress from work.
The trade came naturally to him. As a child, he spent afternoons after school with his grandfather, a clock-maker named Shep (the namesake of his shop), who let him fiddle with the extra clocks he had lying around. Kloberdans finds the inside of a camera to be similar.“See, a clock, that clock up there, times out the hands on it, and the chimes, that’s what it times out,” he explained. “A camera times out shutter speeds... but it’s still the mechanism.”
I first met Kloberdans as the tough and consummately competent camera repairman. My photography professor, Mike Kolster, recommended him when I needed to replace a small and relatively obscure piece of my camera.
When I knocked on Kloberdan’s door, I had low expectations. He introduced me to his garage, and I left with not only the piece I was missing, but also a filter that he found and fitted to my lens free of charge.
“I opened up a shop. I started going around to different camera shops, telling them who I was, and what I did, gave them my card. That stuff just started trickling in,” he said of his large collection of camera parts. “After a while, you just collect them.”
His camera parts collection dominates his garage, though he manages to store other eclectic objects there as well. The collections companions include a Seth Thomas banjo clock, some motorcycles (his Harley has an engine designed by Ferrari), two retro slot machines that entertain his grandchildren, and stacks of bagged wood pellets that fuel the wood burning stove in his basement. The clutter floods into a workshop and his living room, mingling with his living space.
“This stuff is valuable,” he says.
Over the years, Kloberdans has developed a large network of friends through his business. More than two decades ago, he fixed the camera of Claude Montgomery, a local artist known for his landscapes and presidential portraits. As a favor, Montgomery offered to commission a nude portrait of Kloberdan’s wife at a wholesale price of $4,000. The couple politely declined. Today, both Montgomery and Kloberdan’s wife are deceased.
“Once they’re gone, you realize what you should’ve done,” Kloberdans said.

About Town

Good times and family ties: Michaud’s Market draws generations of locals

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

September 25, 2015

Photo courtesy of Ellice Lueders

FAMILY TRADITION: Jim Michaud of Michaud’s Market stands behind the counter of his family’s market in Topsham. This local “hole in the wall” is a favorite food destination for many locals.

The first time I heard the concept “sense of place” was at convocation my freshman year. Former President Mills said in his speech, “Here, we recognize that place matters. Maine is an essential part of Bowdoin, and Bowdoin is a part of Maine.” This resonated with me—the relationship between the college and its surrounding area. Throughout my first year, I took advantage of Outing Club trips and nighttime excursions to Portland, but I still felt like I had yet to burst the infamous “Bowdoin Bubble.” In this column, I attempt to remedy this. Every other week, I’ll explore different places outside the immediate Bowdoin community and talk to those who truly understand what it means to be connected to this place: Mainers.

Fresh off a bike ride across the bridge to Topsham, I walk into Michaud’s Market, and already this place feels so far from the student-heavy crowd on Brunswick’s Maine Street. I am immediately greeted by a posse of four grizzled, smiling men sitting in a straight row behind the bar. It’s perpendicular to the counter where Jim Michaud and his father work, and the bar faces the entrance directly. This is the perfect spot to greet passers-by and chitchat.

“Are you my panel?” I joke, remembering Jim saying something about inviting more people over during our scheduled interview. They have no idea what I’m talking about, and I realize that this crowd is normal, part of a long-standing routine.

Jim enters and everyone perks up. When he warmly greets me, the rest of the crowd follows suit and welcomes me. I ask his friends why they like spending their evenings here with Jim.
“’Cause he’s a wise-ass,” his second-cousin, Jim Thibeault, says with a sideways grin. “You walk in, and everyone’s in a good mood,” he adds.

We talk for a while. The group shares everything from their memories riding around town on bikes as kids to recent moose sightings. Brags about past sports victories punctuate the conversation.

This is how Michaud’s Market works: people gather here day after day, lured by the powerful draw of good company. They joke around with Jim and his father—a sweet man, who winked and surreptitiously passed me a piece of cellophane-wrapped candy—over a couple of beers and some fast food.

Jim thinks fast food is his niche. He was forced to specialize in fast food, in order to stay in business and compete with Hannaford and other large markets. I disagree with his characterization; I firmly believe that Jim’s specialty is not fast food, but a good time.
“This is our hole in the wall,” says local character Paul Reymond.

The crown jewel of Michaud’s is its counter, which is framed by wooden panels filled with evidence of Jim’s devotion to his community. There are pictures of the annual Memorial Day parade (Michaud’s is an unofficial stop because the crowd gets so large there) and the old high school IDs of a few local boys who used to eat lunch there regularly. When the boys went off to college, they wanted to leave a piece of themselves there.

A poster board covered with photos from a disposable camera jumped out at me. It’s headlined “HALLOWEEN 1999” in big letters on the top.

“That’s my brother, who died of cancer, he took these pictures. Every year he would take pictures at Halloween. He took pictures of all the kids and we’d put ‘em up. A week later, they’d all come and see their picture,” Jim tells me. “This was his last Halloween, and that’s why we left them up.”

To this day, people still come back to see the pictures of themselves as children, to share the photos with their own kids and to soak up some of the good company that can always be found at Michaud’s.

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