RANDOLPH — Sharon Rives strolled into the basement of the Bethany United Church of Christ in Randolph on Saturday morning holding a cardboard box filled with tangled headphone wires, three broken CD players,and a dream of one day getting to listen to all the new audiobooks Kimball Library has to offer on CD.

An hour later, Rives, who’d bought each of the three devices on eBay and didn’t want to throw them out, walked out of the church basement with one newly fixed CD player and a smile.

“We did pretty good, I think,” said Rives, who lives in nearby Braintree, Vt. “It seems stupid in this universe to just keep buying stuff.”

Sustainability was the focus of Randolph’s second annual Repair Fair, which was hosted by the Sharon Energy Committee and White River Time Exchange from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at Bethany Church. A variety of “fixers” sat at plastic tables around the basement waiting for attendees to stop by for help with broken kitchen appliances, dull cutlery and bicycle maintenance.

At one table were the seamstresses, Pauline van Gulden and Diane Lints, who each worked diligently throughout the fair mending the loose elbows of sweaters and fixing holes in work jeans and other garments. Ryan Haac, of Sharon, sat two tables away from the sewing duo and spent the morning sharpening knives and other cutlery, while Heather Bowman, 38, of Braintree, stood posted at a book-repair table next to a loose pile of recently mended library books, including a slightly-worn copy of Dracula.

“I just moved back here after living away from Vermont for 20 years,” said Bowman, who learned to fix book bindings and loose pages as a volunteer at Randolph’s Kimball Public Library. “It feels good to do some community service.”

Across the aisle from Lints and van Gulden sat a small-appliance repair bench helmed by Ed Castner, a professor emeritus in chemical physics at Rutgers University, who’d helped Rives with her CD players. Castner, who lives in South Royalton, said he enjoys fixing things in an environment like the repair fair because he doesn’t feel “under pressure” like he did working on repairs at previous jobs.

“Sometimes when we’d do experiments at a national facility, you’re on the clock,” said Castner, who’d worked for eight years as a staff scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. “We’d have three or six eight-hour shifts, and that’s when you’d get your experiments done, (and if something broke) we were going to fix it.”

Castner said his parents, who’d lived through the Great Depression, taught him the importance of making things last, one reason he believes manufacturers should take more responsibility in creating sustainable products.

“(You) shouldn’t get to sell it if you’re not planning on making it last,” Castner said.

In addition to the repair tables, booths were set up at the back of the basement with people from the Stratford Climate Action Group, who taught ways to reduce and reuse plastics in the home, as well as a seed-planting booth and a public-forest advocacy table.

“This is why I moved to Vermont,” said Cindy Cameron, who drove from Norwich to the fair for help fixing her vintage, three-paneled room divider that she bought for $30 at a flea market a year ago. A damaged hinge had busted the divider, which Cameron said was a necessity “for when you want some privacy changing clothes but don’t want to shut the bedroom door so the heat comes in.”

Castner told her she’d need to buy a new set of double-sided hinges and that, once she did, he could install them for her and fix the divider.

“I’ve been waiting (to fix this) for a long time,” Cameron said. “Why doesn’t every village do this?”

Ray Couture can be reached at 1994rbc@gmail.com with questions.

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