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

Mark and his three brothers and sister worked with his parents to build their house using old lumber salvaged from the devastation of large portions of Milwaukee for highway construction.

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, 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 bellman at a Milwaukee hotel, wearing a short-haired wig over his waist-length hair.

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, since I was always too broke to hire anybody to do anything in 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 skills...and who do hire people to help." Almost instantly, he had more work than he could handle, and he stopped taking new cients.

Periodically, Mark would send 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, Mr.HandyPerson was launched.

Since then, the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE has featured a weekly Mr.HandyPerson column, and recently, Mark has been a guest on "Whad'Ya Know?" with Michael Feldman on American Public Radio, among other highlights.

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

He lives there in an apartment with an old cat.