By Karen Youso
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star TribuneNorthfield, Minn.--Small piles of debris sit in a neat row on the counter. Once-tidy scenes under glass just a shake away from a magical blizzard are now no more than rubble.
In one pile, a miniature pink fairy lay like a fallen soldier in the snow atop a black base; in another, tiny pieces of broken birds and snowmen. Some bases are disemboweled, their musical movements yanked out and set to the side.
Propped behind each mound is a handwritten 3-by-5 card with the snow-globe owner's name and location--Oregon, Texas, Connecticut, Illinois, Vermont--and the date it arrived by mail.
Hovering over them is the scriber of the cards, Dick Heibel, a small, thin man with a neat mustache and graying hair. Working from a basement workshop in Northfield, his strong, nimble fingers will mend these mournful relics. He'll add new glass and water, fresh snow or glitter. Broken figures will be repaired or replaced and musical movements fixed and tucked back into the bases.
His workshop, where he unpacks and reassembles the snow globes, is as pristine as a dental office.
He reaches behind him into a recently arrived box from Oregon and pulls out a letter. "You know, every one comes with a letter," says Heibel, 74. "I get the most wonderful letters."
Each tells a story:
"My father was a pilot in the war..."
"My sister gave this to me..."
"It's part of my dead son's collection..."
"My mother's wedding present 50 years ago..."
Many are confessionals about how the snow globes ended up here.
"Most of the time they're dropped," Heibel says.
He grabs a shattered hummingbird.
"I can't remember what happened here, but I'm supposed to replace the broken bird with something similar," he says. With twinkling eyes and a mischievous grin, he holds up a perfect duplicate.
"I had it."
He has lots of material to work with: 20 boxes full, in fact. A bride and groom, birds of all types, trees, even elves with red hats.
An adjacent room is stacked floor to ceiling with intact snow globes, big and small. Some are elaborate with moving figures, gilded carousels, even a mountain with several tumbling waterfalls.
"For years, I bought the leftovers of the San Francisco Music Box Company," he explains. The company, which has since filed bankruptcy, had offered customers a lifetime warranty on their snow globes and music boxes. When they broke or stopped working, customers could return them for new ones.
"I got all the returns," Heibel says. The collection supplies the figures, scenery and movements to fix the pieces. He uses water that is specially treated and sanitized so it doesn't turn green.
Some globes are filled with "snow" from his supply. Others contain glitter from Taiwan. The glitter, he says, is special because it stays aloft for a long time, floating and swirling in the water. Its composition is secret, he adds with a wink.
Heibel is one of the last snow-globe repairmen in the country. His busy time runs through January because snow globes received as presents get broken, sometimes by visiting grandchildren.
"Snow globes aren't toys, but it's nearly impossible not to touch them," he says.
Heibel didn't intend to be a snow-globe repairman. He thought he wanted to be a clockmaker.
"When I was 13 or 14, I worked as an usher at the theater when the Disney movie 'Pinocchio' came out," Heibel explains. "I was enthralled by the workshop and Gepetto." In the movie, when all the clocks go off in the workshop, "I decided to make every single one of them."
That didn't happen. But the movie did inspire him to work with his hands to create and repair. He became an upholsterer, woodworker and picture framer. Now retired, he works at hobbies including creating snow globes.
"Here's this year's Tinkerbell," he says holding up the tiny Disney character. A man in Illinois sends a different Tinkerbell to the workshop every year for use in creating a snow globe.
"I think it goes to a different girlfriend every year," Heibel says, adding with a shrug, "maybe a boyfriend, I don't know."
Upstairs, Heibel's wife and only helper, Irene, answers the phone and assists with shipping.
As a broken snow globe's best friend, Heibel's name is passed by word-of-mouth and appears in publications and on television. Calls come from all over the world--Hawaii, Germany, Guam, Australia--and at all times.
"It may be supper time where they are, but it's the middle of the night here, and I'm fast asleep," he says.
But come morning, Heibel says he can't wait to get down to his workshop to open the boxes and see what's in them--boxes of broken dreams to be set right and sent back.
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