the chaos. He’s headed far uptown to the
Hispanic Society Museum & Library for
a consultation on a massive roof-replace-
ment project. “It’s fascinating,” he says,
“to think of how far building technology
has come since Cuba closed itself off. I was
just starting college then. All my life really.”
He says he’ll wait out front to meet. “It was
built with a 19th-century design, so there
are lots of puzzles. We’ll go right onto the
roof and get a closer look at the work they’re
doing to bring in the light of a new century.”
Honest to God. Just like that, Bob Vila
gives a reasonable teaser for the work he’ll
be looking at this afternoon. The man was
made for television. His work is always at
hand.
W
HO IS BOB VILA anyway? The
first reality-television host? A
contractor who got lucky? A
longtime paid spokesperson for Craftsman
tools? The storyteller of a generation? The
guy from Hot Shots! Part Deux? A journal-
ist carpetbagging as a contractor? Or
beloved, comfy-cozy television host, who
wore his own clothes to work? Or perhaps
merely the first-ever personality to con-
sciously brand himself and move on from
his first success?
Simply put, Vila’s job was that of a new
kind of storyteller. On This Old House, the
iconic home-renovation
program he hosted from
1979 to 1989 that contin-
ues today on PBS and has
won seventeen Emmys,
he had a unique role: to
describe, to kneel and peer
into a crawl space with a
f lashlight, to pull at the
decaying lath, to illustrate
the dangers of moving
forward with the work.
To t r a n s l a t e d e t a i l a n d
describe the difficulties
contractors, and home-
owners, sometimes faced.
Throughout This Old
House, Vila leaned in on
the personality, capability,
and vision of the trades-
men and contractors who
came to each worksite.
Bob Vila’s interview subjects were always
real, sometimes odd; Vila was always Bob.
He shared the camera with them wisely.
They were often older, somehow wizened,
had regional accents, and offered up hard-
won, homespun lessons. This was the
furthest reach of reality television back
then, and Vila was well suited to it.
Vila was a young guy, with the faint
whiff of a former hippie, who’d worked in
home construction (after returning from
similar work in the Peace Corps in Cen-
tral America). Keep in mind that in 1979
network-television terms, escapist fun
like Dynasty was only a couple years away
and Diff’rent Strokes was about as gritty as
television got. And suddenly, over on PBS,
the fourth channel in most viewing areas,
here was This Old House making the pos-
sibility of sweating copper lines to the new
bathroom into something you hoped for as
a cool plot point. And it worked.
Calm. Steady. Engaged. Vila brought
the curiosity of a newspaperman (he grad-
uated from the University of Florida with a
degree in journalism) and extensive expe-
rience with renovation and contractors
(in 1978, he was selected to audition for
This Old House after winning an award
from Better Homes and Gardens for his
renovation and restoration of a Victorian
Italianate house in Newton, Massachu-setts), and knew how to talk to working folk
without anybody looking like a rube. Every
now and then, Vila would grab a wire brush
or a pry bar and go to work.
Then, as now, you watched This Old
House to learn. And it was natural to zero
in on Bob Vila because you sensed that he
cared about the outcome of the projects
from week to week, from season to season.H
E’S SEVENTY-TWO NOW, head
of a laundry list of endeavors
designed to make money. He’s
still dapper, still favors the plaid shirt and
the khaki pants, even the down vest, when
out and about. He’s sitting at breakfast
today, mulling over the implications of let-
ting a key employee go from his online
empire. It seems to pain him. He claims
he’s begun the work of streamlining some
of his obligations, but it sounds hectic.
“BobVila.com is the only media presence I
still have that I still manage. I just took over
as CEO again, because I want to be more
involved. I need to update the publishing
end. Toward the internet. That’s the way
publishing is going. I never thought of
becoming a web publisher, but now sud-
denly I’m a web publisher.”
He can go on about that business. He
does. “We have the old shows in a video
library on BobVila.com, and we’re still pro-Tim Allen (left), star of Home Improve-
ment, one of the top-rated TV sitcoms of
the 1990s, says the show would never have
existed without This Old House. Vila (center)
in a guest appearance, with Richard Karn.