In an old factory where crack houses share the street, Don Siverns makes and upholsters furniture.

He started that job 76 years ago. He may retire next year, when he's 90. Then again, maybe not.

He's definitely putting his weathered wooden sign back up. Vandals knocked it down last month.

It's not that Don gets much walk-in traffic. People seek him out, as they have for generations.

He doesn't look his age. He knows it and is proud. He holds out his hands for inspection.

"No arthritis yet, but it's probably coming."

He's on Sanford between Main and King. Half a century ago this brick building was home to Livingston Stoker, a coal supplies company.

Don grew up not far from here, on the second floor of Weaver Apartments, at Main and Emerald.

His father, a drinker, took off the year the Depression began. That left Mother to raise Don and his two sisters. She was a tailor, and when Don was six she started giving him a little work to do after school, sewing beads and pearls on dresses.

When he was eight, she showed him how to use the Singer sewing machine.

Don didn't tell his friends about this. "They'd think I was a sissy. But I liked doing it."

At 13, he left school and started working at Souter's furniture factory at Barton and Mary streets. There he learned upholstery and frame-making.

When the plant closed, he moved to Souter's store downtown. The war came along, he joined the navy and learned to like rum.

He ate fish and chips at a restaurant called Wilson's in Halifax. He spotted a waitress there named Winnie and married her 68 years ago.

On their wedding day, he gave up the rum and all other spirits. She stopped smoking.

When the war ended, they came back here. With his Veterans Allowance, Don got a $1 lot on East 16th and built a two-bedroom bungalow. It's still home.

Don returned to Souter's for a time, then moved out on his own. His shop used to be on King Street East, across from Wunder Furniture, and 33 years ago he moved into the old factory.

It is a vast space, all full, every item with a story.

A frame, 1 1/4 inch birch, is the twin to one he made for a custom red leather couch about 25 years ago. The customer had seen a couch on the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs and asked Don to make him one just like it.

Across the room is a sagging century-old couch, ornate Italian style, in for repair.

"The mother and father were away, and the boys had a party," Don explains. "They broke the spreaders and it all collapsed." For $300, he'll make it new again.

He's in the lost and found business, too. Found in the cushions: money, knives and forks, jewellery.

"There was a diamond ring. It turned out the people had already settled with the insurance company. I don't know what they did about that."

In the heated portion of his premises is the workshop, where the walls are lined with rubber hammers, vintage wooden yardsticks, clamps, hand saws, springs, bags of clean No. 1 horsehair for antique restoration jobs, one large portrait of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Don's done work for city hall -- including the old one on James North -- International Harvester, the police, the courts, the people of Hamilton.

He was in St. Joe's the other day and a nurse came up to him. "I haven't seen you in 10 years," she said. "My couch is as good as the day you did it."

"That makes you feel happy," Don says.

Son Bill used to work alongside him, but ill health has forced him to quit. So Don toils alone.

His code is simple. "Tell the truth, and you don't have to remember what you said."

And this: "If you don't like your job, get the hell out of it."

But he does not see good times ahead for his profession. Younger people aren't keen to learn the trade.

Beyond that, Don says, much of the product in big-box showrooms isn't worthy of an upholsterer's time.

"It's an awful thing to say, but a lot of the stuff today is just throwaway furniture."

StreetBeat appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

pwilson@thespec.com

905-526-3391