Switched on for a century Family-run lighting and lamp shop a true North End fixture By: David Sanderson Posted: 10:15 AM CDT Friday, Aug. 30, 2024

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/08/2024 (743 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gee, it was just here a decade ago.

Michael Gruber laughs, mentioning that one of the inherent risks in running a century-old business where little if anything goes to waste is that every so often, he will place this or that down, only to wonder where the heck he put it, when he goes searching for it, sometimes years later.

“Believe it or not, there’s stuff in the basement that’s new-in-box from the 1930s and ’40s,” says Gruber, the current head honcho at Ideal Electric Manufacturing Ltd., a combination retail store and service depot at 372 Selkirk Ave. that has been specializing in lighting fixtures, lamps and lampshades since before the Great Depression.

Because he rarely advertises, his unassuming 8,000-square-foot locale is usually the last place somebody hits when they’re stuck for a vintage part, Gruber says, seated in his main-floor office, steps away from a spacious showroom populated by a mix of contemporary and antique desk lamps, torchères and chandeliers.

“They’ll walk in with a lamp or shade that’s been in the family forever, saying they took it to Robinson Lighting or one of the big-box stores, only to be directed over here.

“Seriously, if I had a dollar for every time somebody said, ‘I was told if you don’t have what I’m looking for, nobody does,’ I’d be rich.”

Ideal Electric’s website, as bare-bones as they come, reads “since 1924.” Gruber, 59, isn’t 100 per cent convinced that’s the case.

“I asked my father about that the other day and the number he came up with was ‘probably, but maybe 1927.’ I also asked him if it was true Ideal Electric was ever on Main Street and his response was ‘I’m not sure, but I think so.’”

In any event, what the married father of two can state for a fact is that Ideal Electric was established by his grandfather Simon Gruber.

The way he understands the story, the elder Gruber, who had no electrical know-how whatsoever when he immigrated to Canada from Eastern Europe ahead of the First World War, was working for a separate lighting firm when he got into a disagreement with his boss.

He quit on the spot, then enlisted his brother Aaron to help him start a similar enterprise out of a North End garage.

Gruber guesses he was two years old when he began accompanying his father David, who succeeded his own dad as owner/manager in the early 1970s, to work.

Back then, Gruber’s grandparents lived in an attached space directly behind the store. He recalls hitting his grandfather up for loose change whenever he dropped by for a visit.

“There was a door in the back that led out to Flora (Avenue),” he remembers, noting back then his own family had a house on Matheson Avenue, about a 20-minute walk away.

“There was a place called the Dairy Dell just down the block and I’d run over there for ice cream, before coming back here to see what kind of trouble I could get into.”

Gruber says Ideal Electric has gone through various phases during its long history. Besides catering to individual shoppers, for an extended period the store was heavily involved in the hospitality industry, supplying lamps and fixtures to major hotel chains such as Holiday Inn.

Furthermore, after Canadian furniture conglomerate the Brick Warehouse was founded in 1971, Ideal Electric was enlisted to produce lamps to sell at the Brick’s preliminary locations in Western Canada.

“The manufacturing side of things has pretty much dried up — most of that is done offshore now — but if you go back to the late ’60s and early ’70s, things got so busy that my dad and grandfather opened a factory in Aubigny (a small community south of Winnipeg), to keep up with demand,” Gruber says.

“It was a river property with a spray booth and all these old, rusty cars on the lot. My two sisters never showed much interest, but to six-year-old me, it was paradise.”

Presently, Gruber, who has been working there full-time since age 19, never knows what the day will bring when he rolls in as early as 8 a.m.

(Ideal Electric is officially open to the public from 9 a.m. to noon, Monday to Friday, a limited set of hours that allows Gruber and his staff, which still includes his 86-year-old dad, to devote the afternoon to repair jobs.)

Spring and fall tend to be the peak busy periods of the year, he continues, thanks to cottagers who discover a switch or pull-chain isn’t performing properly when they go to open or close up their getaway.

Eye-catching table lamps featuring cylindrical bodies made from a material called hydrocal were a house specialty 50-odd years ago, and some of those continue to trickle in for restoration purposes.

So, too, does another of their top sellers from the 1960s: an art deco-style table lamp that boasted an ashtray-as-base topped with a cast-metal model of a DC-9 aircraft.

“For those, we did all the casting of the planes ourselves, so I can pretty much tell at a glance if it’s one of ours or not.”

Then there are the custom jobs. Or as Gruber puts it, “all the crazy s—-” people have asked him, his father or grandfather to transform into a lamp. That list includes driftwood, football helmets, vehicle parts… even a narwhal’s tusk that washed up on the shore of Hudson Bay.

Heck, back in the days of the Manitoba Telephone System, Ideal Electric had a standing order with the then-Crown corporation to convert functioning rotary phones into table lamps, to be presented to employees upon their retirement.

Remi Verfaillie has been involved with the local film industry since 2001. As a set decorator, one of his primary duties is to source goods to be used as props in television shows and movies being shot in the city and province.

Verfaillie says when he started his job, one of the best pieces of advice he received was to head directly to Ideal Electric if he ever had any questions about lighting.

“Lots of times, we would find these old antique lights that weren’t working any longer but that we knew would look great on screen. Mike at Ideal was always willing to accept the challenge,” Verfaillie says when reached at home.

“The same thing with lampshades; sometimes one of our designers will want a specific material used to give off a certain effect and Mike will look at the specs and go, ‘Sure, let me see what I can do.’”

Verfaillie, who has enlisted Gruber’s expertise for umpteen Hallmark productions as well as for the award-winning CBC series The Porter, for which Gruber recreated old-fashioned, cloth-covered electrical cords, says it’s invaluable that film crews have knowledgeable enterprises such as Ideal Electric in their own backyard.

“Here in Winnipeg, we don’t have these big prop houses that larger jurisdictions for filmmaking have, so we’re mostly forced to rely on vendors,” he says, mentioning he also recommended Gruber’s place of work to a pal who wanted a full-size canoe turned into a chandelier.

“If it wasn’t for places like Mike’s, we’d be turning to Amazon or other online sources, so it’s absolutely fantastic that we can take that money and keep it in Winnipeg.”

Back on Selkirk Avenue, Gruber may not have a crystal ball, but his 11-year-old son, whose detailed, coloured sketches adorn the door of his office, has shown some interest in the family biz.

During the pandemic, when his son wasn’t able to attend school, the two of them would drive to the shop first thing every morning for what Gruber jokingly refers to as “lamp camp.”

“Even now, during the summer, he comes here for a few hours, though it might be more of him playing around on the computer than doing any actual work,” he smiles.

One more thing: Recall how in days gone by, it was tradition for the life of the party to don a lampshade on their head, for comedic effect?

Every so often, Gruber will be the recipient of the byproduct of such a gag.

On the second floor is a space packed to the brim with lampshade frames — he calls them skeletons — in a wide variety of sizes, so yeah, if a person arrives with one that has become misshapen for whatever reason — it’s not his place to judge — he can definitely help them out, he says.

For more information, go to ideal-lighting.com.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca