Mark Hetts

Mr. HandyPerson is Mark A. Hetts, who was born in Waukesha County, Wis., and grew up on a street called Elmwood Drive (which, after the devastating Dutch Elm disease epidemic, should have been called "Lots of New Homes and Very Few Trees Drive").

Mark and his siblings helped their parents build their house using old lumber, bricks, fixtures and doors salvaged from the demolition of large portions of Milwaukee for freeway construction and "urban renewal."

He attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Madison for roughly four years, studying to be, variously, a teacher, an art teacher, an artist, an architect, a lawyer and a dancer. Before moving to San Francisco in 1975, Mark helped start a food cooperative and a job co-op and worked as a bellhop at a Milwaukee hotel.

In the mid-80s, after a number of other "careers," some friends offered to pay Mark to help rebuild their back porch. "It had never occurred to me that I could actually earn money doing such work," says Mark, "in part because I was always too broke to hire anybody to help me fix up some of the appalling slums in which I lived over the years. As it turns out, there are a lot of people living in urban areas who have more money than tools and skills and who are more than happy to find and pay for handyman help." Almost instantly, he had more work than he could handle, and he stopped taking new clients.

Mark periodically sent a letter to his regular clients to let them know about rate increases or debilitating injuries, and they were so amused by them that they urged him to start a newsletter. In 1992, the Mr. HandyPerson newsletter was launched, garnering positive reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader and The Sun magazine.

Mark eventually developed the newsletter into a weekly syndicated column, which began appearing in newspapers in 1995. The column receives thousands of letters from readers each year. Mark has also been a guest on "Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know?" on National Public Radio and worked for three years as the "How-to Expert Editor" for Amazon.com. His essays and stories have appeared in many national magazines, newspapers, anthologies and Web sites.

Mark has a warm regard for the fair city in which he lives. "San Francisco is the most beautiful city on Earth," he says, "and I expect to go down with her in the 'Big One' and sink gratefully into the Pacific knowing that, like the Mormons when they founded Salt Lake City, for me, this is the place."

He lives there in his home of 25 years with two less-than-brilliant but endearing cats.