Tim Willis grew up in the Fairfax neighborhood and became interested in mechanics from a young age. Today, he still resides on the property where he grew up, where he builds giant robots and other mechanical wonders that he uses to help educate and entertain youth and adults.
I was born at 2265 E. 83rd Street right in the Fairfax district. I was born in 1958. At the time, they were building Fairfax Recreation Center. Coming up in the ‘60s, there were a lot of trees and houses everywhere. Little small businesses, corner stores, hardware stores. The trees used to connect going down the street. We had apple trees, pear trees, grapevines, cherry trees; we had everything. The Fairfax community to me, coming up, because it was all I knew, it was like one big family. Everybody worked together.
People were so nice and generous; they just helped you. But you got paddled in school if you was bad. It was like that with our parents, too. If you do something bad, the neighbor would even whoop you, and then tell your parents. It was lovely. Everybody was family.
Everything you needed was right here in the Fairfax community. I thought this was everything in the world. In terms of stores, we had Fisher’s, Fazio’s, A&P, Pick-N-Pay. We had Taylor’s little grocery store. Jimmy’s little grocery store. We had Lawson’s, Dairy Mart, Dot’s Pharmacy, Robert’s Bike Shop, Western Auto, Sears and Roebuck, Giant Tiger, Gaylord’s, Buckeye Woodland Auto Wrecking, Dennis Hardware, Pressler’s Lumber, Booker Cleaners, Jamison Barber Shop. In terms of hospitals, we had Lakeside, Fairhill, Cleveland Clinic, and the Clement Center – that was the main one where everybody went. All this stuff was right there. We had the Karamu Center. We had little corner stores like Honeyboys. We had Art’s Seafood, Roy Rogers, Open Pit, Vienna’s Cornbeef. You didn’t have to go nowhere.
There were originally two houses on this property. My great-grandmother owned the houses first. My mother’s mother died in 1949. [My mother] moved with my grandmother right here, at 2265-2267 E. 83rd Street. From there, she met my father, and they had four children. I had three siblings. She got married at Emmanuel Baptist church right here in Fairfax, 10 years after she came here, when she was 25. Quite naturally, we got older, and my mother moved around the corner onto Golden Ave. I stayed here. I never left – I’ve been here from birth. I raised my kids here. I just bought the property off my mother and raised my kids here, because that’s all I knew.
My father’s people was born in Paducah, Kentucky. My mother’s people was born right here.
I went to Quincy Elementary as a kid. I got older, had kids, got married, and I stayed in the back house and my mother stayed in the front house. As my kids got older, I said, “OK, I’ll take the front house.” That’s when my mother moved around the corner – she bought that house 40 years ago – and I raised my kids right here in these two houses. I wanted a big backyard for them. As my kids got older, I let my sons move into the front house and I let my daughter move in with my mother around the corner. I took over the back house. I wanted a garage so I could build trucks and a garage and make stuff. Then, after a while, I got carried away and they condemned my house. They said it wasn’t safe. So I said OK, and I tore it down in 1994 and had the garage built. I’ve been working out of this garage ever since. I just tore the front house down like 10 years ago. My kids moved out, and I was like, “Man, I don’t need this house.” I wanted a big yard because I had robots and monster trucks by then, so I tore down the front house and made a yard for the robots. The house was in the way. But I still got the land!
When I was growing up, my mother was a homemaker. My father worked at the Post Office. He sorted mail. My father passed away when I was 13. My first sister died, and then my second sister died when I was 12. My brother died when I was 14. Everybody died from bad heart disease. I guess I took more after my mother, because I’m still here, and I’m 65. So, it was just me and my mom, and I said, “Oh man, I gotta start working.”
So, I went to that place on Woodland, the auto junkyard. I was like 14. I was little. The man said to me, “What you can do is, you can take starters, carburetors off the car when people need them.” And then people would say, “Hey, can you come to my house and put that starter or carburetor on my car?” And I said, “Yeah, for sure. I know how to take it off, I know how to do it!” My father had a lot of tools. Before that, I knew how to repair a lot of stuff. If I see somebody throw away something – a sewing machine, a coffee pot, a television, anything broke – on my paper route, I put that stuff in my wagon, bring it home, take it apart and see how it works. Reverse engineering now is what you call it. I used to watch my father do a lot of stuff too; he was a very good handyman. I figured it out by watching my dad, doing it myself, and trial and error.
When I started building bikes and stuff, I went to this guy Lee, who was a welder, and he said, “I’m going to show you what it’s all about.” And I said, “You’re going to show me how to weld?” And he said, “No, because I don’t want to damage your eyes. I’m going to show you how dangerous this is.” He said, “Look at the sun.” I said, “Man, it’s bright – I can’t see.” He said, “Now put the helmet on.” I said, “Wow, I can see the light. I can see every little thing. Wow, this is slick.” He said, “Welding is the same thing as a bright light. We welding metal together, we forging it together, sparks be hopping. I don’t want to show you, because you’re too young, you’re gonna get hurt.”
So that made me driven. I said, I’m going to learn how to weld if that’s the last thing I do. I went to the library, got books on welding, and bought a little welder. I paid maybe $40, $50, not even that. Got a little welder and taught myself to weld. I got a lot of flash burns and sparks on me, but I taught myself. I had to do it. I worked at the auto junkyard for two or three years when I should have been in school. I told him, “I’m working towards getting this Nova.” I wanted this Chevy Nova because I always wanted to race cars. And every week I used to take it to the Cloverleaf Racetrack to race, but they wouldn’t let me because I wasn’t a professional. One time, I got the opportunity because one of the guys didn’t show up. I was able to race and man, I won. And I was done. From then on, I was stuck. I was a gearhead. I had to keep on going.
Growing up, man, we didn’t have all this computer stuff. We had a lot of time to think and go to the library and study and tinker and take stuff apart. I had a paper route, getting up early in the morning delivering the papers in winter, spring, summer, and fall, and that taught me my work ethic. Every day of the week, we’d get a part of the Sunday paper. So come Saturday night, we gotta put that Sunday paper together and it was heavy. I had to put them in my wagon and pull them in the snow and everything. That taught me work to work, you know, when it was just me and my mom.
So what I did was, I was the neighborhood handyman. If something breaks, they call Tim, and I come and fix it. I learned plumbing, electrical. My father taught me a lot about basic electricity. You take a light fixture, a switch, and a plug. From the plug to the switch, from the plug to the light fixture, from the light fixture to the switch. You got continuity. That makes it work. From then on, I kept on working with it and working with it and I got better and better.
That went on for years until I had my daughter and I got married. And I said, “Okay, now I need a job.” Eventually, I got a job at Warner & Swasey [a manufacturer of machine tools on Carnegie Ave.]. They teach me how to work a turret lathe to make parts. They teach me the CNC, turret lathe, drill presses, cut machines. I kept that job for about a year, or a year and a half. I bore easily. I learned how to run every machine, and once I learned how to run it, it was easy. I said, “Shoot. I’m gonna buy my own machine and start cutting parts for myself now. I know how to do it now.”
I got a job because I needed something solid, I needed some consistency, but I kept racing cars on the side. The money I got from working, I put into my race cars. Then in 1975, I went to the Monster Jams at the Coliseum (monster truck shows). It was Bigfoot and Barefoot, Ford and Dodge, and I was done. I said, “I got to do it.” So, I started building trucks and cars. People thought I was nuts.
Everything I needed was right here, it was right in the Fairfax community, and that’s what made it so great. People used to have me build swing sets for many years, and I went to Presser’s Lumber and got my nails from Dennis Hardware. You know, everything’s right here. My whole life consists of being in Fairfax. I didn’t have to go far. I learned it from the Plain Dealer, from being a good paperboy. I used to take my little wagon, my Western Flyer wagon, to deliver papers.
I used to take my kids to the corner store, Honeyboys. That was a barbeque place. And they would take this little bag of potato chips, and take this scoop of this little special sauce, and put them on a bag of potato chips. And man, that little bag of potato chips with some sauce on it was the best thing ever. I could get that for a nickel on my way home from school.
Then all the little stores and stuff disappeared. The big stores, that’s all that left. So now, we gotta venture out and go somewhere else. We had to take the bus over to Broadway or wherever. It was hard watching that change every year, every decade. It took all the love and family away because everybody was out for themselves again. Nobody was trying to look out for the corner store and stuff like that, the places where the owners would say, “I’ll give you your baloney and ham today, you pay me Friday.” Everything changes. You gotta adapt.
When I was coming up, Cleveland Clinic was a little-bitty building. Look at it now. It’s pushing a lot out. A lot of people gotta tighten up and clean up. And I ain’t mad, because look at that market on the corner (Fairfax Market).
We had the Karamu. That was something big, going to Karamu. You could see people doing shows. We learned to sing and dance. To see people on the stage, that was inspirational. Then, later on, we’d see some of those people in movies. And we’d think, wow, they came up here, to Karamu!
Across the street from me now, there’s 40 units of housing or something, and it’s grandparent housing, with 40 grandparents raising their grandkids. So I said, “Okay, Tim, you got to change up things, instead of having everything concealed, you gotta open up. Spread stuff out so now people can come in and look at it.” I had a lot of things to inspire me. But what these kids got to inspire them? So, I began to build a little park, and I put the robots out here and the trucks out here, so maybe they’d be inspired.
I have kids here every day. They ask me, “How did you do this? How you do that?” So, I’m keeping what I was raised on – family. Everybody worked together, and you show somebody something. I want them to get inspired by what I do. I’m showing them something they can do with their hands, their own hands. You could give them all the computer background and everything, but I help them learn what a Phillips screwdriver is, what a crescent wrench is. With the robots, I go to school programs like Ingenuity Fest, all the fairgrounds. I’ll be there the whole week. Kids ask me how I make it, and I tell them I use my imagination. I don’t exactly know how to build a dragon when I start out, I just know I want to build a dragon. So, I start with the feet and work my way up. I want them to look at things the way I looked at it – to use creativity.”
