Repairman fixes military wife's broken furnace for $1

Fox News ^ | January 25, 2016

[Hojczyk]

When a military wife’s furnace broke down, a Pennsylvania repairman stepped in and fixed the malfunctioning unit at a huge discount.

He charged her $1.

“He said that the $1 was a joke and to thank my husband for his service,” Bridget Stevens wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post that has gone viral.

Paul Betlyn of Moon Township’s Betlyn Heating and Cooling said the job normally would have cost about $150, but he gave Stevens, a mother of two, a “deployment discount.”

“I’m not the hero here,” Betlyn told ABC News. “The deployed, they’re the heroes.”

Her husband, Bobby, is deployed overseas with the National Guard. So when she arrived home to a cold house one evening earlier this month, she called Betlyn, expecting to get an answering machine.

“Ultimately, Paul, the owner, answered and was very patient as he walked me through different things to do to try to get it back on,” Stevens wrote in the Facebook post.

But when none of Betlyn’s suggestions fixed the issue, he drove to Stevens’ house to look at the furnace himself.

“As he was working on the furnace, we got to talking about Bobby and the deployment,” Stevens wrote. “I had mentioned in passing that I tried to figure it out with my husband, but since he’s deployed and couldn’t see it, he wouldn’t know what to do.”

Stevens said she was “apprehensive” about the cost. Then Betlyn handed her the bill.

“I was completely overwhelmed and in shock when Paul handed me the slip,” Stevens told ABC News. “I didn’t really know what to say, and I still have a hard time finding the words to truly express my appreciation.”

[Hojczyk]

Betlyn said he was just continuing a family tradition.

“My grandfather was a milkman during the Great Depression and many times he’d go to the door and the woman didn’t have any money for milk. But the baby was crying in the background. So he’d put the milk on the table,” Betlyn told ABC News. “And when I heard about Bridget with her husband being deployed…I put the milk on the table.”

Betlyn has since started a “Military Deployment Kisses Fund” on gofundme.com. The aim is to raise money to send families overseas to meet with loved ones during lengthy deployments. He’s raised nearly $1,500 in three days.

[cyclotic]

ATTN: Pittsburgh Area FReepers,

Y’all have a new furnace guy

1144 Maple St Ext, Coraopolis, PA 15108
Phone:(412) 262-2111

I hope this guy is inundated with new customers.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Nice thing to do but it reminds me of a joke I heard once.

[Pontiac]

$150 is about as cheap as an emergency service call can get. So this guy is very reasonable to start with.

But this has turned in to a very cheap and effective advertising campaign for his business.

[Rockingham]

Similarly, in Witness, Whittaker Chambers described a time when he and his wife were desperately broke with an infant to care for and a broken furnace. As the repairmen worked on the cold furnace, they took the young family's desperate situation in. When they finished their work, they explained that they had applied a special ceramic glue that might do the trick and to call them back if it did not. They then left without charge for the repair, which proved effective. Chambers described instinctive generosity toward the downtrodden and out of luck as both a natural American attribute and a refutation of Marx and Lenin.

[Theodore R.]

Great post; Whittaker Chambers was something else: too bad so many of the American people believed Alger Hiss instead.

[lewislynn]

Price gouging.

[Joe Boucher]

Saint Pete finds out about this kind of stuff ya know

[Georgia Girl 2]

Pay it forward.

[JimRed]

But this has turned in to a very cheap and effective advertising campaign for his business.

And as a side benefit, it will discourage liberals from calling him, since they hate the military and are generally troublesome to work for anyway!