Paul Bickford/NNSL photo
At an age when most people are well into retirement, Allyn Rohatyn is still building his business.
The 77-year-old recently opened a storefront for his upholstery business in Hay River's Caribou Centre.
"I always tell people this is what keeps me going," he said. "I often think about a lot of the guys that retire when they're 65 and they have absolutely nothing on their mind as to what they want to do in their retirement. A year later, what do they do? They're dead."
Rohatyn said he doesn't want to live life like that, even though he has had three heart attacks.
"I love doing what I'm doing," he said. "There's nothing that I would do to change it."
Rohatyn's interest in upholstery goes back to when he was growing up in Saskatchewan.
"When I was five years old I learned to sew on an old treadle sewing machine," he recalled, referring to a machine that is powered by a foot pedal.
When his family moved from his hometown of Bienfait to the larger town of Estevan, he happened upon the beginnings of an upholstery career when he was 13.
"Every day when I would walk to school I would walk past this little upholstery shop and there was a little old man in there, and I would stop and I'd look through the window watching him," he said. "And one day his wife said, 'Come on in. Come on in.' I went in there and he said, 'Do you want a job?'"
Rohatyn said it was there that he learned the ins and outs of doing upholstery as an after-school job.
When the owner of the store fell ill, his wife offered Rohatyn the equipment of the business, and he accepted.
In fact, the power sewing machine that he now uses in Hay River originally comes from the Estevan store.
"It's quite old, but it runs like a charm," he said.
Rohatyn worked as an upholsterer in Saskatchewan and British Columbia for 20 years, before attending university and becoming a social worker specializing in alcohol and drug counselling.
It was as a social worker that he first came to the NWT in 1995 to work in the Deh Cho as an alcohol and drug program co-ordinator, and later as a probation officer.
In 2006, he retired to Hay River and bought a house.
Rohatyn – who had carried his upholstery tools with him wherever he went – noted that there was a small unfinished building behind his new house.
"So I finished it and put my little shop in there, my equipment," he said, noting he has since done part-time upholstery work there while occasionally also working elsewhere.
"It was big enough to do small jobs, maybe a chair or a sofa and stuff like that," he said. "But it wasn't what I had in mind as far as a business. I wanted to have a storefront."
With the opening of Allyn Rohatyn Upholstery in mid-October, he has returned full-time to his first trade.
"I like taking something that's worn out and shabby and putting it into a new perspective," he said, adding he puts love and care into his work.
Rohatyn explained he can repair a wide variety of items.
That can include chesterfields, chairs, snowmobile seats, winter fronts for vehicles or anything else that needs a new cover, he said. "There's no end to it."