‘Gary the Lamp Guy’ repairs Baltimore’s brightest art pieces

Gary Black is a dog person and names them after musicians, including Sly, his black Boston Terrier. But Black’s working life is much more comparable to a cat with nine lives.

Black, 72, went to trade school to be an electrician after graduating from North Hagerstown High School in 1972. His first job was with Shifler Electrical Associates in Hagerstown.

He also dabbled in careers as a full-time musician in the mid-1980s with his band, A Shot in the Dark; as a sound engineer for productions by accounting firm Ernst & Young; and as a freelance sound engineer for major programs like “60 Minutes.”

Of all those jobs, Black, who learned to play guitar at 9, loved being in a band the best, though drug and alcohol struggles ultimately dashed the band members’ ambitions, he said.

Being with the band was “so much better than anything else I’ve ever done,” he said, “but it’s also harder than anything else I’ve ever done.”

The Hagerstown native moved to Silver Spring, to Shepherdstown, West Virginia, to Annapolis and, finally, in 2015, to the Rosebank neighborhood in North Baltimore.

By then, he was contending with health issues and increasingly couldn’t keep up with the pace of commuting to Washington, D.C., for freelance sound engineering gigs.

He decided to retire last year and devote himself to a longtime hobby: Through his many moves and job changes over the last 30 years, he has also collected lamps.

“I just thought it was a cool thing to do,” he said.

His fascination budded into a full-time service, based in his home, to repair and refurbish light fixtures.

Next to his washer and dryer, Black created a little workshop, where screws and bolts are organized by size and style and wire droops from spools.

He finds most of his business through NextDoor, where he’s building a small but consistent following as “Gary the Lamp Guy.”

He used to go to auctions and secondhand stores for lamps, but he said he finds them overpriced. These days, he’s letting the light fixtures find him, and hopes to build out a website soon and possibly find a new location for his workshop.

How would you describe a day of business?

Well, right now it’s pretty dead. You know, I get maybe one or two calls a day, and people are really interested in getting something fixed. But then I don’t hear back from them because it’s not something that’s critical for them to do. So, they hold off until they notice their lamp again and they say, “Oh, that’s right, I was gonna get this fixed.” So I’m not high on anyone’s list.

What’s something you wish more people knew about offering this service?

All the lamps that people have bought in the last 20 years are made in China, so they’re crappy lamps, crappy parts. They last five or six years, and people don’t know what to do.

So, they have these lamps sitting around, not working, and all the people that used to fix lamps went out of business because of the Chinese products. It’s just cheaper to just throw away stuff and buy something new. But that’s not the case anymore — even the Chinese stuff is expensive.

What’s your next ambition for your service?

I just would like a little more business. Hopefully, I’ll do more with a Facebook page to see if that helps. I’ll try to contact some lighting companies to see if they can set up a shop for me. That would be ideal.

What would you say is your favorite part about repairing or refurbishing lamps?

It’s just seeing the craftsmanship and the artistic part of whoever designed this stuff. It’s just really cool, the materials that they used, and what they went through to make a nice lamp.

What do you think is the appeal of this service?

It keeps art pieces out front in people’s eyes, because where are you going to find stuff like this? If it’s not working, people are going to push it off in a corner or throw it away. Whether it be old or new, there’s an artistic element to every lamp and light fixture made.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.