1946
Bob Vila is born
to Cuban immi-
grants in Miami.
His father report-
edly built the
family’s house.1951
Frequent family
visits to Havana
leave Vila, at age
five, determined
to become an
architect.1968
Vila graduates
from the Univer-
sity of Florida
with a degree in
journalism.1971
He serves two
years in Panama in
the Peace Corps,
establishing
power and water
for squatters.media,” he says.
laughs at the thought. “Not so much,” he
says. “But I was born in Miami, so I know
how to dress down there.”
T
HE LASTING association between
Vila and the American audience
(the show had eleven million
weekly viewers at its height under Vila) is
that first one—that guy and his look—Vila
in the plaid shirt, moving from job to job in
an old house, working to focus his audience
on the particulars of the work being done
there. The show grew so popular that it
inspired a generation of television hosts-to-
be. Jonathan Scott, one half of HGTV’s hit
show Property Brothers, gives quick and
easy credit to Vila for piquing his inter-
ests—performing, contracting, building.
“He was always on our television, always in
the background of everything we did,” he
says. “He was enthusiastic and interested.
He asked good questions, he was always
looking into things. He was like us—like a
student, mostly. That guy was like the
soundtrack of our lives, the voice coming
from our TV room. I’d recognize his voice
anywhere.”
Vila left the show thirty years ago, after
a vague controversy surrounding his com-
mercial endorsement of a New Jersey
Great Moments
in
Bob
most closely associated with his time as the
renovation tour guide for the first home-
improvement show ever. Men and women
of a certain age remember Vila, working a
construction problem with master carpen-
ter Norm Abram in the gutted living room of
some crumbling gem in suburban Boston.
Abram proved to be a television force of his
own, but the back and forth between them
was remarkably subtle and unscripted ball-
busting. It is remembered still.
“That’s a generational thing,” Vila says.
“We were the first to do it. We got bolder,
and did more every season, sure, but the
show stayed on point. The producers a lways
said it was simple: demystify what’s behind
the plaster. That same story was right there
in people’s homes, too.”
Vila is prompt to give This Old House the
lion’s share of the credit for his success. His
recognition as a cultural icon, however, is
really his own work. The branding thing is
no joke with the man. In 1990, Vila broke
away from PBS and started his own show,
Home Again with Bob Vila, which lasted
sixteen years on cable. (It was eventually
retitled simply Bob Vila, which by then
said it all.) He followed that by setting up
his own website, accompanied that by writ-
ing twelve books on architectural history,ing. In 2016, he released a retail line of tools
named Bob Vila.W
HAT MAY HAVE cemented Vila
into the foundation of the cur-
rent cultural consciousness of
America may have come in the ’90s, when
comedian Tim Allen starred in a sitcom
with the name Home Improvement, based
in part on the chemistry between the host
(Allen’s character, Tim Taylor) of the fic-
tional improvement series To o l T i me and
his affable, skeptical expert tradesman (Al
Borland, played by Richard Karn), who
played a version of Norm Abram. To com-
plicate the doppelgänger situation entirely,
Vila himself had an occasional role on the
show, playing himself, as a more competent
and expert rival host to Taylor’s version of,
erm, Vila himself.
In creating the show, Allen was not shy
about borrowing on what worked between
Vila and Abram. “I loved the implied rela-
tionship between Bob and Norm, the
everyday quality of things. They seemed
to be kidding each other sometimes. And I
ran with that at the beginning,” Allen says.
“But in comedy, you’re always looking for
any little thread of tension between con-
tractors. I was imagining theirs mostly. IVila and TOH cohost
Norm Abram pictured
in This Old House, a
home-renovation guide
published in 1980, one
of Vila’s 12 books.